Working Your Email System to Success — Save Time and Energy to Focus on What’s Most Important
Working email is much a mindset as it is a task. If you allow email to take over your entire work structure, it will. And it is easy to let that happen. More than I like to admit, I find myself spending all of my time in email versus working on items that will actually move the business forward. In retail, it feels like email IS the work sometimes, and I am sure that goes for many other industries as well. Email has become such a core component of communication and deliverables. In many cases, the work assignment comes via an email, and often the work is to provide an email back. Rarely do either of those things result in a better customer experience or an increase in sales. It becomes a chain reaction. A question is asked at an executive level that results in emails that extend three or four levels down. When that begins to happen frequently, it feels as though the email can take over.
Some of that cannot be solved by a system or process alone. However, the more you can align systems up a channel, the email trail can be curbed to minimize distractions. Understanding when and how emails are processed can build a more productive approach to getting work done while still staying connected via email. If a District Manager knows (and better yet establishes) email time blocks for the team — it can be easy to set up specific windows of time that email communication is reviewed and responded to for their Store Managers. That may be a little more challenging as it moves up the chain, but it can be done.
Set up time for email
Fear of missing out is a real thing. Sadly, we apply that to email as well as other more important things in life. We are afraid that our boss might send us an important email at any time, so we feel a continual need to check to ensure we are not missing anything. In an earlier article, we covered setting up VIP email notifications. These will let you know when specific senders have sent you an email. That way, you know if you might need to respond to a certain email. The trick is to not get sucked into more email if or when you check that one from your VIP.
Outside that, establishing times that you will check and work email is an imperative step in being able to get a handle on your email inbox. I would recommend no more than three windows of time on any given day. Morning, midday, and late afternoon should work in most instances. This ensures that you can check on anything important from a non-VIP sender, stay informed, and respond to anything that is truly urgent. Establish time frames for each of those sessions. Not all of them need to be equal. Your midday time frame should only be long enough to scan, triage, and reply to only the most urgent messages. I would recommend this is no longer than twenty or thirty minutes. Your morning session and afternoon sessions could be a little longer. However, try to keep your email blocks to no more than seventy-five minutes. You will be surprised at how much you can accomplish in a window of time with a good process to follow.
A system for sorting and managing your inbox
Knowing what you will do with each email that comes in is probably the most important step in managing your email effectively. I have established buckets for different actions on each email. As we discussed in the last article, having the folders set up to handle the next steps allows you to quickly work through your inbox. Touching each email the fewest numbers of times is the goal. Read the email, sort the email, repeat. Then go back and act on each as needed. I have found this is highly effective in working through even a large collection of unread emails. I frequently find more than eighty unread emails in my inbox for my late afternoon review. That usually feels daunting and almost impossible to work through. If I tried to work each to completion before moving on to the next one, it would be. But, usually, even in those worse case scenarios, I can process my inbox in fifteen to twenty minutes. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean I am done. It just means that the first step has been completed and I now have a prioritized worklist to go back and complete.
Buckets
I keep mentioning buckets for these emails, but what does that look like? I set up a folder for each of these — ‘quick reply’, ‘today’, ‘this week’, ‘in process’, ‘follow up’, ‘review’, ‘awaiting response’, and ‘reference’. They are in that order and I actually have them numbered in front of the words so they are arranged in my email application (Outlook) in that order directly under my Inbox. As I work through my inbox items, I review and determine which bucket the email will go into. As mentioned in the previous article, the hard part is forcing the decision to get every email into one of those buckets, archived, or into the trash. If it is purely informational, requires no further attention, or follow up, I archive it immediately. One touch and done. Likewise, if the email doesn’t need to be saved or ever referred back to (i.e. a one-time report or junk email) those should go directly to the trash (don’t forget to unsubscribe quickly if it is something you never want to see again from an outside sender).
I have put together a quick one-page explanation of each of these buckets that you can check out HERE. This gives some additional details on how I use each of these buckets on a daily basis.
The Process
As you work through your inbox and move each email to the correct bucket, you will find that you can work through this very quickly as you get better at it. Unfortunately, that is not the end. Once bucketed, you can now work in order of priority to complete the email exercise. I start with my quick replies, as I know these can be knocked out quickly and likely will take little effort to respond and move on. They do not require any additional research or follow up.
The ‘today’ bucket is next, and these have some sense of urgency to them. Even if there is no full resolution available, I know I need to begin to work on these items. Once I start and react to these emails, they will either move to be archived if it is complete, to the ‘in process’ if I have additional work that I will be doing on it, or to the follow-up bucket if there is work from someone else I am waiting on and need to validate its completion.
That approach works for the ‘this week’ and the ‘review’ buckets as well. I usually use the ‘review’ bucket for items that I know I need to read, but likely will not require any additional action on that specific email.
Connecting to other communication and systems
I created the ‘in process’ bucket for emails that will trigger further conversation or discussion with the rest of my team or specific people. In most cases, anything in the ‘in process’ bucket is also in my task manager application or in my ‘to do’ notes for the next meeting/discussion I have with my team (or specific individuals). This ensures that the emails do not get lost and I know that action will be taken on it.
Maintaining the system
It can be easy to move the problem of emails collecting in your inbox to these other boxes without regular review. I typically run through every bucket each morning as part of my morning email process. This ensures I didn't miss anything from the day before and allows me to capture anything I need to act on today as part of regular conversations. Done well, each morning the ‘quick reply’ and ‘today’ buckets will be clear. Those should have been completed the previous day as part of your end of day/afternoon process. In the morning, what may exist in these boxes would be any emails that came in after your last work session the previous day.1 This same process gets completed at the end of the week (I usually do this on Sunday mornings) to ensure that nothing has built up in the ‘this week,’ ‘follow up,’ or the ‘awaiting response' buckets. If there are things in any of those, I take the necessary follow-up action to either send a follow-up email, assign to someone, or schedule on my task calendar the work that needs to be done.
If anything has gathered in your ‘review’ bucket and is more than a few weeks old, determine if you really need to do anything with that. After that period of time, it probably can just get archived to give yourself some clear space in this area.
In many ways, this system follows the general concept presented by David Allen in his excellent GTD (Getting Things Done) book. Most email processes I have researched have some variation of what I have covered above. You still need to ensure you set it up for yourself and your own needs for managing email. Then it takes discipline to work within the system to keep everything flowing as expected. It does take practice and patience. That may sound weird for something like working email, but we all know what it feels like to be controlled by our inbox. We have all seen people with hundreds if not thousands of emails in their inbox. It doesn’t have to be that way. Use your system, work your process, and you will find you have a lot more time for the real work that gets things done.
How will you set up your email system? How will you practice it to ensure you build a strong habit and routine around it?
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I do usually have a supplemental email work session after dinner each day to do a quick triage of emails that may have come in after I last worked the inbox. I try very hard to not review/look at email after this supplemental session. Reading email right before going to bed rarely has any positive consequences. ↩