For many people, maintaining proper email communication has become a real problem these days. If you are like me, you are getting around 150 to 200 emails per day adding up to 4500 to 6000 per month. If you would use only 2 minutes for each individual email, this would require you spending something around 40 hours per week just for sorting through your email. Quite obviously, this is not possible or at least not in any way healthy. The real scary thing, however, is that these numbers keep increasing continuously. And they do this at an alarming rate, at least in my case.
What can be done about this? There are some rather extreme measures. A couple of years ago declaring “email bankruptcy” became popular. At the same time, some of my friends started using services such as spam arrest to automatically filter out everything they did not explicitly approve beforehand. Other people decided to opt out of email entirely. (Btw, remember the – above depicted – classic Seinfeld episode “The Junk Mail” in which Kramer decides to opt out of mail?) These are all interesting options that make great blog posts, but unfortunately not at all possible for regular people with regular jobs (try telling you boss that you have decided to stop reading email…).
Nevertheless, if we like it or not, sooner or later we all have to accept the fact that the technical possibility to receive an email in an inbox does not necessarily mean that we can actually read it, let alone respond to it. The best we can do is to set up a system in which we try to deal with the ever-growing email influx in the most efficient way possible accepting the possibility that we might annoy some people that take a more conservative approach to email communication.
In the following I would like to briefly explain the way I deal with my email. This is a system that works very well for me mainly because it somehow evolved naturally over the years (I never read any of the “Getting Things Done” or “GTD” literature but I understand I stumbled upon pretty much the exact same principles). Maybe this is of help for some people out there, especially for those who need to communicate with me through email.
In lifehacker-speek I follow a strict Inbox Zero strategy meaning that whenever I attend to my email account, I do not stop unless all of my email has been dealt with and removed from my inbox. The second key principle is that I never file emails in folders. Once an email is dealt with it gets either deleted or archived, nothing else. In the era of intelligent search algorithms, email folders are no longer needed and should therefore be a thing of the past. The rest is actually a straightforward GTD strategy:
- If an email is unimportant, it gets either deleted or archived.
- If an email is cc’ed to me, it gets archived.
- If an email can be delegated, it gets delegated and archived.
- If an email takes less than 2 minutes to respond to, it gets dealt with immediately and archived.
- If an email takes more than 2 minutes to respond to, it gets deferred. I now do this by forwarding it into my Evernote account where it ends up in a “To Do” notebook and gets dealt with in the order of importance whenever I find the time for it. The email itself gets archived.
There is only one catch to such a GTD system. Emails that get deferred can end up on the bottom of the “To Do” pile for quite a while. Some time ago in a related email tip, Internet guru Kevin Rose suggested setting up a reply system that automatically asks senders after two weeks if the original email is still relevant. While this is an interesting idea, I have chosen a much simpler approach by asking people to remind me in case they are waiting for my response to an email. So far this is working reasonably well as long as people are at least to some extent aware of how I handle my email.