My Zero Inbox Method: Continued
Let’s pick up from where I left off on my Zero Inbox post, and flesh out a bit more on how to deal with email. As a quick recap, the idea is to go through all new emails and carry out an action on them one by one, so that by the end of it your inbox is empty again.
How often to process email
How often you do this processing each day depends on the nature of your role and the volume of email you receive. There are some obvious fixed times (e.g. mid-morning), for which you can book time in your calendar ("Email check"), or you could just assume email checking will form a background task that you will have to do even if you are in the middle of something else, e.g. just before a break.
If you get a lot of email and are likely to be spending more than 15 minutes sorting them out, then it’s best to actually book regular time in your calendar, otherwise it will get out of sync with what you are actually doing.
Avoiding getting distracted by incoming emails
Another thing to absolutely avoid is to allow yourself to jump on an ‘interesting’ new email and then spend half an hour working on it when you’d been planning to do something else. The best way to stop this from happening is to turn off those notifications. Now, of course, urgent correspondence can come in and derail your planned day, but you’ll catch that when you do your next ‘round’ of processing.
Categories
Alongside the folders we’ve already talked about, you can consider adding tags or categories to all your emails, which can make it easier to identify and create search folders for them. Outlook has the Colour Categories feature for this. For example, I have categories such as ‘Sales,’ ‘Corporate Website,’ ‘Prospects,’ and ‘Recruitment.’ This is essentially a replacement for complicated folder structures and gives a nice visual reminder about the nature of each email. Assigning a category to each email is also a part of my regular processing routine—it gives me a few seconds to think about each email in turn so I can assign it the correct category.
Following up email you have sent
When sending an email, you can flag it for follow up (and add a reminder) so that you can chase it up if you don’t get a reply. It’s well worth dwelling on this. It’s all too easy to send an email and forget all about it if you don’t track it. Flagging emails aren’t just for emails you receive. You can do this easily within Outlook.
Email is not an information store
Make sure that an email isn’t the only place where an important piece of information is held—emails should be for correspondence, not information retrieval. It’s often best to immediately copy any relevant bits and put it in your notebook or other relevant document or system.
Purge your reference folder
Once a day (or week, depending on how much email you get), scan your Reference folder and archive any emails that you no longer need to keep to hand—you need to do this to make sure it doesn’t keep growing.
Dealing with email newsletters
Email newsletters, circulars, notifications, and other ‘junk’ mail can be a real waste of time if all you do is press the Delete key each time you see them. Of course, if you do need some for your work and genuinely read and value them, then fine. Otherwise, set aside 15 minutes and unsubscribe from any that you don’t need. Another approach is to automatically send them into a ‘News’ folder, but only do that if you genuinely intend to set aside some time each week to review them (otherwise you’ll just end up with a large folder full of junk mail).
Waiting for the response to an email
Sometimes you need to wait for somebody to respond to an email before you can continue with a task. Even in those circumstances, it’s a good idea to schedule some time a few days ahead (for example) in your calendar for completing the task, even if you don’t quite know when (or if!) the response will arrive. That way, when it does arrive, you don’t have to panic about finding time to progress it—you’ve already made time for it in the calendar and it will happen.
You can always postpone it if still doesn’t arrive, and it’s another good reminder as well that you might need to follow up if necessary.
Sometimes email isn’t best
Finally, it’s worth repeating that while email is good for many things, sometimes it’s just so much easier and less time-consuming to just pick up the phone (or call on Teams). What might take half an hour to sort out over several emails could easily be cleared up on a two minute call. If you’re struggling to write the email and get your message across in words, it’s probably an indication that it might be better to speak.