E-mail Wrangling 101

Do yourself a huge favor and get a handle on your e-mail. The e-mail is such an overused and abused communication method at this point, that we’re all drowning in the stuff. For corporate types, knowledge workers and execs in particular, it has reached a pandemic that is sucking productivity and effectiveness out our businesses. To handle the 50-500 mails a day you are getting you need a system and you need to consistently use it. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already.

I’m the diet book you don’t need to buy to know you eat like crap. I’m the nag at the back of your brain reminding you how inadequate you feel for letting e-mail win. I’m not the expert that explains it eloquently. I leave that the Mr. Mann and Mr. Allen.

To get started, read the great series “Inbox Zero” over at 43 Folders. Before or after that, watch Merlin’s recent Google talk, conveniently inserted below. Here’s are my major takeaways from the video.

• Use a processing system. This is basic common sense. We tend to forget or ignore common sense because it tends to require being honest with yourself and taking action. Anything you need to do over and over and over again is worth doing quickly and reliably. Automate as much as you can with filters and automagic folder sorting. I like Merlin’s proposed system and it happens to be the one I naturally arrived at. For every single message, there are five choices.

1. Delete or Archive
2. Delegate
3. Respond Now
4. Defer
5. Do Now or Create a Next Action

• Always keep the ball moving. Don’t let a message sit in your inbox without a decision made on it. If you need more information to take action, make the request and either get rid of or file that message. Letting messages sit around and accumulate dust makes your life harder because you keep processing that message every time your eyes run across it.
• As with just about anything in life, the key principle is “It’s all about doing.” The greatest theory or idea is worthless without action. Consistent action leads to habit.“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
• Remove barriers to effectiveness and action
  • If you check mail every minute you are wasting a lot of time.
    • Turn off new mail notifications – This includes toast, dings and the like
    • Establish a schedule for checking mail – Once every 20 minutes, once an hour, four times a day. Whatever it is it’s better than spending all your time in your inbox.
  • If the volume of mail puts you in panic or procrastination mode you need to conquer that fear.
    • Use Merlin’s dash hack to take action in small chunks – Committing to processing mail for 10 minutes at a clip is less daunting than clearing 100 messages. May sound dumb and too simple, but it is amazing how well it works.
    • Use sorting options in your mail client to identify spam and junk and delete it right away.
    • Consider deleting anything older than a month, two weeks or whatever timeframe you feel OK with.
  • Get fast, The Flash kind of fast, at processing and responding to mail.
    • Take a look at www.sentenc.es for the elegantly simply approach of limiting all the email you write to a set number of sentences. I know that won’t work 100% of the time, but even it worked as little as 25% of the time, you’d save a heck of a lot of time.
    • Ingrain whatever system you follow or come up with in your mind so it becomes pure habit. No thinking. Pure action.
    • Limit the number of folders you store mail in. More folders leads to more thinking which leads to slower action.

Happy processing!

Know Thy Time

I’ve spent the past few weeks examining my work patterns and trying different tools for my GTD system. This post takes its title from a chapter in Peter Drucker’s “The Effective Executive“, which catalyzed my thinking.

Reading Drucker’s book and coincidentally finding David Seah’s “Printable CEO” series of posts, I was struck by a common sense moment. I exclaimed, “Duh! I need to know what I am doing with my time before I can manage what I need to do!”. Then I remembered I spent seven years studying mathematics and physics which tough me how to experiment, gather data and solve problems. Boy, am I wasting my education! Questions flooded my mind. “What do you do with your day?” “Are you doing the right things?” “What important things aren’t you doing?” Now I have the makings of a research problem and I was juiced up to tackle it.

My GTD Credo

I spent some quality time writing my thoughts on why my GTD implementations have failed in the past, my vision for a system that works and identifying further research I need to do before making a selection of tools and developing my GTD framework. More about tool selection and the framework in upcoming articles.

What I have now is a set of principles, “My GTD Credo”, that will guide my revamp.

Time for some serious Org-fu!

I read David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” about 4 years ago and was a converted true believer right off the bat. Unfortunately, I am a horrible procrastinator and have done a lousy job at implementing a system that works form that I follow and use every day.