Email etiquette











Multiple studies of our email addiction agree – we’re spending far too much time just managing our inboxes, and not enough getting on with our “real work”.
For some of us that’s hundreds of incoming messages a day, and as much as 2 or 3 hours every working day spent just dealing with them.

All this is a massive drain on our attention, focus and energy, and a major barrier to being productive.
As well handling our own bulging inboxes, how we each write the emails we send out is a major factor in the effectiveness of team communication and productivity.
Making sure we attend to a few basic points of email etiquette is a good place to start.

For Think Productive’s favourite email etiquette tips, click Here for a PDF of our recent article in NAHPA magazine.

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Make friends with your email again – AND get some actual work done

Author: Lee Cottier, Productivity Ninja
LinkedIn: LeeCottier
Twitter: @LeeCottier

Multiple studies of our email addiction agree – we’re spending far too much time just managing our inboxes, and not enough getting on with our “real work”.

For some of us that’s hundreds of incoming messages a day, and as much as 40% of our working hours spent just dealing with them (source). Just this month, a revealing LinkedIn survey (LinkedIn login required) showed that over half of us are ‘checking our emails’ in excess of 20 times every day.

All this is a massive drain on our attention, focus and energy, and a major barrier to being productive – and a big part of the reason why our niche Email Etiquette and Getting Your Inbox to Zero workshops are so popular.

Here are some practical steps you can take to develop a healthier relationship with your email, and ensure you can win back enough attention and energy to actually get some work done!

1. Turn off notifications. Remove all visual and audio ‘you have new mail’ notifications. You did know that’s possible (and allowed) didn’t you?

2. Turn off email. Even better turn off your mail client completely most of the time. Yes I really did say that. For those of you who are worried the world might end if you did that, I promise you it’s quite safe.

3. Schedule time for email. Only engage with your email when you choose to, rather than automatically complying the instant it nags you to. We recommend defined times in short bursts, for example 5-10 minutes at the top of every hour, or longer 20 minute sessions 3 or 4 times per day.

4. Stop constantly checking. Instead ‘process’ your mail (more on what that is below), then get back to doing your actual work. As Merlin Mann (who coined the term ‘Inbox Zero’) says “stop taking orders and make the sandwiches”!

5. Use the tools. Learn how to use the features of your mail client to triage your mail for you. Filtering the lower importance and lower value email (which you can then review once per day), will help you to give your proper and prompt attention to those messages that really matter.

6. It’s an inbox not a data vault. Your inbox ‘should only be for things that you haven’t read yet’ (again that’s from Merlin Mann) – when you ‘process’ this mail your aim is to convert incoming mail into to-do list action items, calendar appointments, download and file attachments, etc.

7. Move it out. As soon as they’re processed mail items should immediately be moved out of your inbox: either deleted or archived, or if it does require action that can’t be completed there and then (in less than 2 minutes) to a ‘needs action’ or ‘needs reply’ folder etc.

8. Lose the pile. That last one’s really important so I’m going to say it again. Don’t just leave that opened mail sitting there in your inbox (or even worse flag it or mark it as unread again ‘so I know to come back to that one later’). After all, no-one keeps all the opened letters they’ve ever received and their envelopes in one massive ever growing pile on their doormat!

9. It’s not a to-do list. Stop using your email inbox as your to-do list (it’s horrifying how many people do this!). There are far more appropriate tools for this job, and it will reduce the temptation to keep your mail client open all the time, increasing its power to distract.

10. Feel the relief. Working this way will help you achieve ‘Inbox Zero’, which feels great, and is hugely important part of a robust personal productivity approach.

And remember, email addiction is just one (bad) work habit that might be reducing your productivity and effectiveness. For other way we can help you or your team deliver their very best work, check out our full range of in-house and public workshops, or contact us for a consultation with one of our team of Productivity Ninjas.

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10 top email tips from Think Productive

graham allcott

1. Keep your inbox at zero. Be clear on what’s coming in, which emails are putting pressure on your time and attention and what you need to keep on top of. By aiming to keep your inbox at zero, this will help you make up-front decisions about what each email means, which are valuable to you and which you need to be ruthless with.

2. Perfect the art of the subject line. Writing clear subject lines is the most sure-fire way to reduce the volume of emails come back at you, as well as to ensure that the emails that you send to others are clearly understood and quickly dealt-with by their recipients

3. Keep it short! The website www.five.sentenc.es suggests never using more than five sentences in an email – if you’ve got more to say, pick up the phone, or put it in a word document. That way, your 5 sentences in the email can be devoted to describing the action required and is likely to be more clearly understood. Add ‘www.five.sentenc.es’ to your email signature to ensure that your colleagues hold you to the five sentence rule!

4. Make decisions. Never close an email back down without having decided what action, if any, you need to take as a result. That way, you’ll never waste time reading an email more than once. Reduce procrastination time by increasing your decisiveness.

5. Turn Outlook off! Don’t be a slave to your Microsoft Outlook account. Turning it off, even for just an hour a day will increase the focus and energy you have available for other (non-email) tasks

6. Don’t mistake connectivity for productivity. Blackberry and iphone users often fall into this trap. It’s easy to mistake being connected with things getting done and just as easy to feel pressured or tempted to be replying to emails late into the evening. Actually, we need our rest time, so spend time NOT checking your Blackberry, relax and you’ll be surprised how much easier some of those decisions are the next morning after a good nights’ sleep!

7. CC less. CC is an over-used button and the cause of much of the excess volume that we see in so many offices. Think before you send an email about who REALLY needs to be CC’d in – remember every email interruption costs a colleagues’ time, so decide who you need to bug versus who you can spare. You’ll find if you do this regularly, others will start to develop more respect for your own time, too!

8. Keep your reference folders simple – having sub-folders and sub-sub-folders only makes it difficult for you to quickly file emails away. Have a simple folder structure with no more than a dozen, broadly-defined folders. This will save you heaps of time filing away and the chances are it won’t affect your ability to retrieve emails at all.

9. Know your audience. Resist the temptation to send comedy forwards to professional contacts you want to respect you, but equally recognize when a little informality will help build a stronger working relationship.

10. Think about it! Surveys have shown that the average employee spends about 41% of their time on email, so even getting slightly better at it can be a huge productivity saving. Facilitate discussions about email policies within your organisation and invest in some good training!

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Spam in the Bin, Bacon in the Fridge

We all know what to do with email Spam – our anti-spam filters catch it and put it in the Bin where it belongs. If they’re working well we don’t even see it, never mind read it.

But there’s that big pile of other low-priority mail that’s still waiting for us every time we open our inboxes.
You know the sort of things we mean – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter notifications, group newsletters, bulletins, service updates etc.

There’s a name for this stuff too – “Bacon”.

It’s mail you have asked to be sent, but really it’s only a few steps up from Spam.
It’s swamping the really crucial and time critical mail we want to be able to spot easily, and give our proper attention to.

So, what’s the solution?
Well, where would you keep your Bacon at home – in the Fridge of course!
Somewhere it will be safe and tucked away so you can grab it when you want to, and then close the door on it again quickly.

OK, that might be stretching the metaphor a bit too far, but here’s how we think Bacon email should be handled:

• Use filters and rules to automatically identify as much of it as possible the moment it arrives.
• Get your email client (or web interface) to divert it away from your main inbox (which we’re keeping just for the good stuff), either to a labeled category (if you use Gmail) or a separate folder (e.g. if you’re an Outlook user).
• ONLY go and look in there at planned times – e.g. daily, twice weekly, weekly etc. whatever suits you best. You should be processing the Bacon when YOU choose, not as a reflex when it happens to come in (we advise turning off those new mail alerts too).

• (Advanced Ninja tip) Tweak your filters further so that the Bacon gets sorted into different ‘flavours’, so can choose which one you want and when. For instance my Gmail setup separates out Twitter and LinkedIn stuff and all the newsletters I’ve subscribed to into different catch areas, well away from my main inbox.

Even a handful of well chosen filters and rules will dramatically reduce the amount of low-priority mail you see in your main inbox.
It doesn’t take long either – if you add only one filter or rule a day (takes seconds when you’ve bothered to learn how for your email client), by the end of the week you’ll see a huge reduction in inbox “noise”.

It’ll also mean you can deal with the remaining important messages better too – and then get out of your email altogether, and back to doing some real work!

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Thunderbirds are go!

Hi and welcome to the new blog, which will be the place where we chat personal productivity, GTD, email, meetings and anything else that comes along. We’re on a mission with everything we do to help people find ways to love their work: work CAN be less stressful, information overload CAN be tamed and you CAN love what you do. Even if you don’t love the job itself, you can love how much easier you can make it.

So that’s what we’re going to do on here. It’s a natural progression as that’s really what we do with our workshops as well. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Drop me a line: graham@thinkproductive.co.uk

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