Graham Allcott

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210 billion emails are sent every day. How many of those end up on your inbox?

Try these 3 tips to bring it back under control – PLUS there are more ways to get help here!

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth about the way that we work.

We check for what’s new, we scroll up and down, we check for what’s new, we scroll up and down, we fiddle around creating archive folders, we check for other new information (for example on our social media profiles or the news or our phone).

What we’re addicted to here is the illusion of productivity for a minimal payoff of thinking.

Getting your inbox to zero breaks out of this bad habit and changes the way you see email.

3 MINDSET CHANGES 

Your inbox is not your to-do list. Your inbox is to your work what an airport runway is to your holiday.

The impact of an email isn’t felt in the inbox it lands in; it ends with an action, a reply, something read and filed, or something deleted.

> Don’t let your inbox nag you: Checking too often can become a deadly disease. Turn off every sound and graphic. That way, you can revisit the inbox when you’re ready to, not when the inbox is nagging you to return.

> Don’t check your email – process your emails: This might sound really simple, but it’s one of those subtle changes that’s actually profound. Don’t check what’s new, but make decisions and create the momentum needed to move those emails to where they need to get to. You can only get it out of your inbox if every option you need has an obvious next step (More advice on this here)

> Regular Review: Making time to follow up, double check, print, clean up and generally do some housekeeping on your email system provides a regular chance to do some routine maintenance and a little bit of strategic-level review.

Like this? Try these

Still struggling? – how about one of our Getting Your Inbox to Zero workshops - 3 hours of Ninja-email tips and tricks and at-desk coaching? (download PDF course overview here) 

TASK: Hack Your Emails to Death Think Productive

The definitive eight-point guide to email inbox nirvana guardian.co.uk

Two Tips for Gmail Users to Manage Email More Efficiently lifehack.org

Graham Allcott

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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!

Need some help? Sign up to one of our email training workshops