This needs to be said, and I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about this: When you send someone an email, call them, text them, as easy as it is for you to send those messages you must remember that you’re essentially assigning them work. This is a critical concept if companies are going to move away from the horrible perception that “email is work”.
It’s not, it’s generally a giant waste of time, and is making people do less during the day and constantly feel overwhelmed as they try to respond to the misdirected and non-actionable communications they’re constantly receiving.
When you receive an email, you have to do a few things:
1. Read it (the physical action of reading and understanding the intent & meaning)
2. Parse It (evaluate what kind action it requires)
3. Act (write back, take action, plan something, schedule an action, etc.) Just get it out of your inbox and turn it into something that has clarity. If you can’t do this respond with these words “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking of me, can you clarify please so I can take specific action? If you’d like we can jump on the phone for a few minutes.”
4. Archive your email. You don’t need tiers and tiers of folders organized by client, or project or category, if you’re properly addressing your emails and parsing them into actions, they’re essentially no longer needed. If you need it, do a search for the sender or project title. If you’re working on a group and need to track projects through email, add a subject to your email that references the project so you can search and sort via that tag. Just don’t try and organize anything, assume searching will work fine for you.
Now these 4 things can take anywhere from a few seconds to hours of time (yes if there’s a complicated project requiring responding to complicated client feedback and revision requests). If you’re on top of your communications and responsibilities, whether it’s to your friends or family, you follow this process for every communication that comes in. And it can be overwhelming, and when it becomes overwhelming you lose control over your process and soon you have thousands of emails sitting in your inbox, and this leads to the worst place you can be:
Using your email as a To-Do List: Stop the madness!
Because if each email in your inbox represents something you need to do, you’re going to immediately feel overwhelmed. Here’s why: Your subconscious mind is there to help you solve complicated problems your conscious mind can’t manage. And when you fill up your subconscious mind with tons and tons of unresponded communications, all of which represent something very fuzzy and hard to define as an action, you’ll feel like it’s essentially hopeless, and then you go into triage, which is essentially managing what you feel is urgent and trying to ignore what’s not a pure emergency. And there you have it, you’re in a constant state of mental “emergency” where you can’t pay attention to the things that matter in your life because your subconscious mind is in a stressful “doing just what I can do to keep afloat” mode. And then all the stuff you need a clear head for (anything important in your life) get’s the attention of a brain that’s firing on two pistons.
So how do you handle this?
1. Keep a dashboard of categories that are important in your life and assign actionable steps for things that you both need and WANT to do. Treat needs and wants with equal importance.
Here’s Mine: Client Projects, Personal Responsibilities, New Business development & Connections, Friends & Family, Art, Type & Music, Adventure, Ideas, Maybe Someday, Review Frequently (Kind of a Giles’s life best practices thing I look at once a day to remind myself how not to put my foot in my mouth, etc.) I organize every action under each of these categories, and try to give all of them attention every day, so I have as equal emphasis as I can on family as I do work, same goes for adventure and personal responsibilities. This way I don’t let my errands get in the way of reading to my kids, a movie with my wife, designing a new typeface or playing paintball.
2. Zero your inboxes and start following a Getting Things Done like process. When you receive an email or text, respond to it immediately if you can in a reasonable amount of time, or parse it into an actionable item, put it on your “dashboard” and kill the email. Set the expectation of the sender when that will be complete.
3. Remember that you are assigning work to people when you email them! If you create a process for yourself like the above, I guarantee, once you feel the amazing clarity of direction that having a grip over your communications gives you, you’ll thunk twice about sending long emails with fuzzy expectations to your family, co-workers, team, etc.
4. If you can handle something over the phone, do it.
5. Now breathe deeply, and focus on the things that make you happy, like real work, guilt free play, and all the things that bring richness to your life that never occur when you feel overwhelmed by an inbox of unclear and fuzzy time wasting requests!
Here’s 2 books I highly recommend if you want to explore this topic further:
The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Enjoy!