I Got 99 Problems, and They're All In My Inbox

It's been replacing human interaction since 1971. It was meant to make life easier, but it’s made things more complicated. It’s the most hated part of work. 

Email.

99% of the time it's not adding to your team's performance. It's not freeing up time for you to do more important things, and it's not making you smarter. It makes you feel busy. It gives you the feeling people want to talk to me!

More emails don’t mean more money or more time. It's procrastination disguised as productivity. You don’t get paid based on the number of emails you get. So why show off that you get 20 more per day than your co-worker? Bah!

Rant aside, here are a few ways that have helped me save 4-5 hours per week. This has also been tested in sales environments, so for those of you who get emails from clients directly it'll work for you too.

Emails only need to be checked twice a day.

Checking emails doesn’t help my team. Why should I spend more time clearing my inbox than I do with them? And why should you?

I don’t expect you follow this advice blindly though (but it will work if you do). Instead, let me tell you why this works.

One morning on my way to work I was reading emails on my phone. I was about 10 minutes away from the office but I decided to reply to an email that irritated me. Another manger had was accusing one of my team member of a mistake she didn’t make. It was untrue, and I had to defend her. 

So I emailed while walking down the street to the office. I matched his tone. I didn’t realise that the director was copied in to the email. Shit.

I just gave a huge negative impression to my boss’ boss. I was on the back foot, because of one poorly written (and unnecessary) email. I could have waited and had a conversation with him in 10 minutes, but I was impatient. This wasn’t the only time I made a mistake through email, and I bet I’m not the only one. 

So what actually happened? 

First, I felt the need to be on my phone checking emails before I needed to ‘because I’m a leader’. My belief was that ‘leaders are meant to be busy’.

Second, I replied on instinct. 

There’s a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. After reading it I noticed what I was doing. I wasn’t giving myself the time to think slow. I wasn’t processing the information properly or thinking about the impact. 

I was so comfortable with sending emails that I had stopped thinking about them, and that has cost me more than once. Thinking fast actually slowed down my career. So when I first started reading the 4 hour work week, this technique really worked for me.

HOW YOU CAN APPLY THIS:

I set times in my calendar at 11am, and 4pm each day to check emails. Why those times?

I want to use the morning to work on the knowledge intensive tasks, like projects, training plans, ideas. So this gives me two hours (if I start at 9am) to get the challenging work done for the day.

Remember, there’s no body language or tone of voice at your disposal. You have to really think about how you’re saying what you want to say. Focus.

Choose two times that work best for you. There will definitely be some trial and error before you get it right as you want it. You can start with 9am and 3pm if you’re already in the habit of checking emails first thing. Gradually shift them to a later time when you care less about them.

I can hear you thinking 'but what if something is urgent and I don't see it until 11am?' Trust me, if it was that urgent you would get a phone call. 'Urgent' emails shouldn't exist. We can't support or set the expectation that everyone needs to be glued to their inbox all the time. You need to have time to do some ‘deep work'. You'd be surprised at what you can get done in the morning when you don't have distractions. Find an empty meeting room if you don't have an office or a corner where you won't be distracted and get your most knowledge intensive tasks done for the day. I've found this time good for checking progress towards the strategy, goals for the week, and for innovation.

But what if my boss expects that I respond to his/her emails ASAP?' First, I would find out if that's really the case or if that's your insecurity talking. 99 times out of a hundred, that's an expectation we've set on ourselves. Tell your boss that you might be a bit slow to respond for the next week or so as you want to work on [fill in the blank]. Pro tip: make it something your boss wants to achieve. I guarantee they won't be disappointed, it shows you're listening to them and you're making changes. People in power like to be listened to. If that week works out, keep going.

But my day is jam packed with meetings, how can I pull aside an extra hour in my day for emails?' I hear you. I just have one question for you: would you rather be able to focus clearly on what's going on and be present, or prefer to feel like you're juggling a million things? I've been there man. I was responding to emails between meetings and during meetings. What I realised was that I wasn't doing either task well. I wasn't focused and contributing to meetings to the best of my ability. I wasn't influencing my stakeholders well. And I was skimming emails, so I wasn't working through those well either. I wanted my team to succeed, so I made this 'drastic' change. Leadership takes courage. Fight for your time. Initially, it will be a battle. After a couple of weeks, it’ll be a superpower.

But I work in sales and I need to respond to clients quickly so I don't lose them to a competitor'. Well, same here! I've worked in back office, analytics, sales, and business management. Trust me, your customers will prefer to have better proposals, rather than faster responses. The quality of your touchpoint will trump the speed of your response every time. If you're afraid of losing them to a competitor, pick up the phone and call. No email can beat that.

But an hour a day on emails isn't enough'. Generally, a standard work day is 7.5 hours (in Australia at least). What you're saying is you need to spend more than 13% of your day everyday handling an admin task. Can you see how that's not the best use of your time? Fight this belief to the core. You own your time. Initially when you make the switch to this method, you may need more time but try to limit it to the 1 hour max. If you don't have any distractions and can focus solely on emails, you should be able to clear everything. I believe in you, bro.

Pro tip: Conversations matter

If you're spending a lot of time going back and forth in emails, use the 'Conversation View'. I'm still surprised by the number of people who have never seen this. If that's you - check your email provider settings and try it out. Thank me later.

You can also try different ‘views’ and set ‘rules’. It’s worth investing 30 minutes to understand how to use the program and you spend most of your time on. 

Don’t stick with the default that’s made for the masses. You’re not average. Find a view that works best for you. Do it for your team.