Pop quiz: Do you wish you received more email?
Answer: That’s a ridiculous question.
I’ve been thinking about email a lot lately, because for the past few weeks I’ve been tracking how much time I spend managing, writing, reading, forwarding, filing, responding to, and (sometimes) cursing it.
The verdict: Whatever the number is that’s bigger than “crap-ton.” (Octillion? Vigintillion? Googol?)
It turns out I spend about four precious hours a day. Yet, ironically, there are probably people reading this now who are wondering why I never responded to their last inquiry.
(Is this you? Whoopsie. Hit me again?)
So in the first month of 2015, I’m committed to something basic and pedestrian but necessary. I’m committing to doing email better—by shedding the excess weight in my corpulent, noxious beast of an inbox.
Why? Because doing so gives me more time to do the things I actually feel productive doing: writing, speaking, walking my dog.
Click for full infographic at Contatta
Most business professionals spend more than 637 hours managing emails every year—or about 13 hours per work week—according to email software company Contatta, based on statistics it culled from the US Bureau of Labor and McKinsey Global Institute. That’s a lot of hours spent shuffling a depressing amount of email around, Contatta notes, and an enormous drain on businesses—not to mention your psyche.
But we have things to do: programs to run, products to launch, content to create. Here’s what I’m trying to detox my own inbox… with advice from a few friends.
1. Batch and tackle.
Dedicate certain work hours to reading and responding to email. Or, if you’re like me and you can’t help reading it via your smart phone, at least try to group your responses. In other words, respond to a bunch of inquiries at the same time, versus answering them one by one, as they come in.
“Set up specific time blocks to check your email so you don’t get distracted every time a new message pops in,” says Alex Moore, CEO of Baydin, the company behind Boomerang, a popular Gmail plug in and email management tool. Gini Dietrich, CEO of Arment Dietrich Inc. in Chicago, suggests checking email before and after meetings to triage urgent client requests, but never during.
Approaching any task with this batch-and-conquer mentality is less taxing, research finds. But even without the research to back it up, it makes sense to not drop everything each time your email notification pings.
2. But for the love of Pete… don’t use autoresponders.
Some people regularly put auto-responders on their email, informing the sender that they respond to email only at certain times of the day. Doing so sets expectations, I suppose. But I’m not really a fan of the practice, both for practical reasons (with rare exceptions, it’s unnecessary) and for philosophical reasons (why add to the amount of email in someone else’s inbox while trying to manage your own?)
One exception: Vacation autoresponders. I’m a fan.
3. Answer email in offline mode.
If you batch and tackle your email responses, try doing so in offline mode; that way, the emails you send don’t prompt an immediate response, distracting you from your batching efforts. I chanced on this approach when answering email on an airplane without wi-fi, and I realized how much easier and less distracting it was.
“When I’m focused on a particular project, I turn my inbox to offline mode so I can still work in there, but not be interrupted by the constant flow,” Gini says.
4. Hush those bells, dings, chirps, ribbits…
Speaking of email pings… here’s a trick I recently adopted: Turn off email notifications on your computer and cell phone.
“Every time you hear that ding, it takes your brain over a minute to fully regain concentration,” says Alex Moore.
5. Write simple, direct responses.
As with any content, brevity and clarity trump long and meandering, as I said in Everybody Writes. Does a clipped answer feel rude? It’s not. It’s simple respecting your reader’s time as well as your own—and keep your responses direct and to the point.
Use as many words as you need to reply in full to the sender, but not a keystroke more. In other words, a long-winded response is indulgent.
As longtime writing teacher Don Murray once said: “The reader doesn’t turn the page because of a hunger to applaud.” Don wasn’t talking about email specifically; nonetheless, his advice applies nicely.
6. Yes, and…
Speaking of brevity with your response, avoid a protracted email volley with a recipient by being proactively specific in your response, rather than open-ended. So, say you’re agreeing to a lunch meeting—say yes, and then suggest three specific times and dates, and have the recipient pick one of them.
Yes, and… is a rule of improv. But it’s also a good rule for cooperative, efficient communication.
You can also avoid unnecessary email replies by including a No Reply Needed (NRN in Internet-speak). Assuming, of course, no response is actually needed.
7. Lose the generic subject lines.
“An email subject line is similar to a blog post title, a newspaper headline, a movie title, a tweet, the first few words in a Facebook post, the introduction to a book, and so on…. It’s the hook,” says DJ Waldow, a career coach and co-author of The Rebel’s Guide to Email Marketing.
DJ suggests that most people tend to treat personal email subject lines as a throwaway—writing generic lines like “Reconnecting” or “Question” or “Introduction,” when they’d be better served by making them specific, unique, and actionable.
From a productivity standpoint, ultra-specific subject lines will make it easier for you to find archived emails, DJ says. So instead of “Question,” try adding what the question is about, like: “Cavalier King Charles Spaniel rescue dog?” Or instead of “Reconnecting,” try “Coffee Tuesday?”
Fun fact: the “rescue dog” question was a real email from DJ to me. Here is the result of that exchange. (Cuuuute, right?)
8. Ditch the sub-folders.
Finding messages by scrolling or searching (via keyword) through a single inbox is faster than looking through hyper-organized folders, suggests Alex Moore.
I agree with Alex, but I should mention that this is a highly contested issue in email productivity circles: Some argue that folders and sub-folders actually bring more clarity and simplicity to an inbox by allowing you to group similar emails together. (For example, newsletter subscriptions, or marketing offers, or work-related vs. personal.)
9. Opt out of unnecessary newsletters and notifications.
For example: notifications from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, all of which notoriously over-email when you get a response or new connection. They’re the email equivalent of chemical additives, making for bloated and less nourishing inbox. Same goes for newsletters that tend to pile up in your inbox, going unread. (You’ll never get to them, so don’t save them for later.)
You can use various tools to unsubscribe from mailing lists en masse. None will be perfect, but it’s a starting point. Check out Unlistr or Unroll.me.
Other services allow you to create disposable email addresses—including MailDrop, Air Mail, and 10 Minute Mail. They’re useful for when you don’t want to fork over your actual email address.
10. Use an email manager.
You also have access to free and paid tools for managing your email more efficiently, including Sanebox ($6/month), Mailbox (free), and Boomerang and Mailstorm, both of which are for Gmail. They vary in performance and features.
My pal Kerry O’Shea Gorgone, an Instructional Designer with MarketingProfs, likes the simplicity and intuitive features of Sanebox. “It scans my inbox and watches where things end up,” she said. “It’s like an intuitive and smart inbox that makes my life a little easier.”
11. So… what did I miss?
Let me know below.
(Note: A version of this previously appeared in Entrepreneur magazine with the headline, Detox Your Inbox.)
You mentioned reading email on your smart phone. I’d recommend doing that less and less. It’s an awful lot easier (and faster) to read and respond to email on your computer and you can spend more time smelling the roses and interacting with life around you. The tiny screen we bring along with us is only the promise of life, not actual life. 🙂
You speak the truth, Stan. Thanks for the eloquent reminder.
All great suggestions, I’ve never thought to work in offline mode. To Stan’s point about reading and responding to less email on one’s phone, I’d only suggest using the phone to triage if you have the downtime and opportunity. Which leads me to my next thought:
Qualifying what you want to receive in your inbox is important too. We have many different messaging and communication channels now, is there even a need to have everything come to your inbox? For me, action items go to my inbox. Back and forth communication can be done using project management tools or social messaging.
Oh, and newsletters. They go to my inbox too, but I read, reply if a reply is required, clip anything important from it to Evernote, then delete.
Good point, Stephan. Maybe I deal with more email because of the virtual setup here at MarketingProfs, and we tend to communicate more fully in email than most companies (or so others have told us). Even my Basecamp stuff has an email component, too.
Evernote is the bane of my existence. I’ve NEVER been able to get the hang of it. And I always feel oddly inadequate about it, too.
When I read your tip on notifications, I immediately searched for the setting to turn them off! I get so distracted when that little box pops up on my screen – I think it takes more than a minute to regain my concentration. Hopefully turning them off will allow me to stay on task longer.
Also, I agree with the comment above. After being a slave to mobile email for a couple of years, I disconnected my work accounts and haven’t looked back. When I’m on the road or I’m working from home, I just make a point to set aside time to get on my laptop and check my email. It all circles back to batch and tackle! I should note: Not a single person has every complained about me being unresponsive – they have my phone number to call in an emergency.
I really like that tip re biz email…. I might experiment with that and see how it goes. (Working up the gumption now…. LOL)
I have every single one of those Vegas-style buzzers and lights turned off in my email. If I need to check email, then I check email. I wish I could make this a standard rule in our office. It drives me completely buggo when I’m in a meeting with my boss and I can tell he’s distracted by the incoming bells and whistles!
Also, not entirely related to email, if I’m really trying to get into something, I’ll even turn off the little clock in the corner of the screen.
Whoa Kate — hardcore! Love it!
Cute dog.
#LIVEFYRE
I apologize upfont for being a little contrarian here but I know you welcome all POVs. First, yes, I have long ago turned off Outlook’s darn little dings & pop-ups. Too, those can get you in trouble when you are screen-sharing and that stupid alert arrives showing your buddy’s inappropriate subject line!
Yet I ‘live’ in my inbox all day long and read and reply to new emails as they come in. Much of my actual job (sales & account mgmt) IS writing & replying to email – e.g. providing info requested by my clients and prospects, answering my colleagues often urgent requests regarding projects they are doing for my clients, sending out prospecting emails, etc.
So, a tactic of only checking email during certain hours or batching them or removing work email from my phone would not be viable or desirable for me. In short, Email = Money (possibly, hopefully – IF I reply quickly and effectively) coming in to the company.
Now, I will try to block off a chunk of time for non-email activity, but I’ve never been able to stick to hard plan like “every morning at 8:30am I will spend 30 minutes to do xyz important recurring task and stay out of my inbox.” To paraphrase Charles Barkley’s famous Father Time quote, my Inbox remains undefeated.
Yet I believe your list of recommendations could be useful to “creatives” like you writers (and editors and powerpoint makers and coders and candlestick makers……). Y’all *do* need to step away from the inbox and go build all the stuff that guys like me gotta sell!
Ah yes… good point. Sales is the definite exception… because email IS, essentially, the tool for your job. I suppose the equivalent would be me shutting off MS Word.
Thanks for chiming in here, Toby!
Several years ago I listened to a talk by Merlin Mann (called Inbox Zero), and I’ve done my email based on that talk ever since. I zero my inbox mostly every day, certainly once a week.
Everything that comes in can only be handled once in the inbox, then I either delete it (deleting emails fast is a superpower).
If I don’t delete it, then it is either archived, or, if I need to do something about it, it goes to defer (that also needs to be cleared at least weekly) and then things that relate to projects are put into subfolders for that project.
I find organizing by action (what I must do about it) is much more effective than organizing by what it is (subscription, blog post, work).
One additional thing that I learned from a very busy boss was subject line emails. He often sent short one liners only in the subject line.
Great points — I like organizing by action vs. type, especially.
(Keeping this short in the spirit of your response.) 😀
This comes as I stared at my inbox this morning and wondered how it got so full.
You are my spirit animal.. so please tell me you worked through it all!
Can you please follow this with “10 Ways to Deal with the Amount of Stupid Email You Get?”
You win for making me literally El Oh El.
All good suggestions. The proliferation of email can certainly be overwhelming. Clearly another strategy taken by many is to simply ignore or delete emails. Maybe they fester in an inbox and get batch deleted at a later date.
Clearly all of these positive suggestions imply doing something with each email.
As a sales person this is really frustrating.
“Simple direct responses” is great advice. Unfortunately, I’m my own worst enemy in this regard, despite having read Twain’s advice, “Eshew surplusage”, the Elements of Style, “Omit needless words”, and being told by my son (back when he was about 4) “Too many words, Daddy!”
LOL I kind of love “eshew surplusage.” That needs to be the title of my next post… 😀
I try to batch a few times daily, unless I am pitching reporters by email and then I eagerly await their replies.
Nonessential items, including newsletters, ecommerce sales, announcements from the residents association where I am a representative, etc. all go to an email address that is ONLY on my iPad. That way, I am not interrupted during work hours when at my desktop or using my cellphone.
I check this non-business, non-personal email twice daily, either breakfast or lunch and after 9:00 pm. I highly recommend this alternate email address. You will be surprised to learn how often Staples, etc., email you.
That iPad idea is genius, Janet.
Thanks again for putting this together Ann. I try and batch as much as possible, but I often forget about the importance of making your subject lines – and thus, your intentions – as clear as possible! A good reminder that email isn’t the be-all, end-all.
Perhaps a good follow-up would be on hilarious out-of-office replies. Preferably ones that stop people from wanting to constantly follow up with you ;).
I’m glad I read your blog post. Honestly, I get so annoyed when I receive notifications from Twitter and Facebook because I already have those apps on my phone to notify me when there is any activity. It really made me think about how I need to unsubscribe to those ASAP because of how annoying they are.
Another thing, I actually did used to think that short and to the point email responses were kind of rude but after reading this it make me realize that emails should be concise instead of super wordy.
Also, I had no idea Email Manager existed. Thank you.
I use multiple email accounts created thru cPanel (domain name based)
For instance, anything connected to domain names goes into domainnames@. . .
I make blog comments using blogcomments@. . .
I sign up for free stuff using freeoffers@. . . freeoffers45@. . . (etc)
For my social media accounts (social bookmarking, Twitter, Facebook, etc) I will use socialmedia@. . .
Also, I use family@. . .
This segregation has greatly simplified my email life.
I use a separate email account for all the serious stuff (membership sites, affiliate accounts, online purchases)
Finally, I use a productivity tool to set a TIME LIMIT each
time I tackle email tasks. Otherwise you can easily get sucked into the email quagmire.
Keep the faith!
Robert
Love this idea! Lots of ways to adapt it. You could send the different accounts to different devices, like Janet’s tip to send nonessential stuff to her iPad. Extend that by reading different accounts in different apps or different inboxes. Maybe even sending some items straight to another person who helps with email on a specific subject.
What helps me most is to batch email by the frame of mind needed to process it. All the “read and skim” stuff together. Queries together. Social notifications (if you still get any) together. Doesn’t matter if you use folders or labels or stars or something else, as long as your email appears to you already grouped by frame of mind.
I’ve done this with filters, and GMail’s newer Inbox app does a lot of it automatically, sorting into different “bundles.” For each bundle, you decide whether you want to see all the time, just once per day, or once per week.
I find the most important stuff has an easier time rising to the top when all the other little things are already sorted out of your way before you ever look in there.
If you want to receive less email, send less email!
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Great, I think answering in offline really makes sense.
I am using Boomerang for managing my emails, and it works great. It offers amazing controls and features on how to receive/send and when to receive/send emails. Initially Boomerang had problems during its beta version but they have made a lot of fixes and it’s getting better.
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