Five fast email productivity tips - Help I am drowning in a sea of communication

There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.

1. Shut off auto-check - Either turn off automatic checking completely, or set it to something reasonable, like every 20 minutes or so. If you’re doing anything with new email more than every few minutes, you might want to rethink your approach. I’m sure that some of you working in North Korean missile silos need real-time email updates, but I encourage the rest of you to consider ganging your email activity into focused (maybe even timed) activity every hour or three. Process, tag, respond to the urgent ones, then get the hell back to work. (See also, NYT: You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention)
2. Pick off easy ones - If you can retire an email with a 1-2 line response (< 2 minutes; pref. 30 seconds), do it now. Remember: this is about action, not about cogitating and filing. Get it off your plate, and get back to work. On the other hand, don’t permit yourself to get caught up in composing an unnecessary 45-minute epistle (see next item).
3. Write less - Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more information, pose a question, or just say “I don’t know.” Stop trying to be Victor Hugo Marcel Proust, and just smack it over the net—especially if fear of writing a long reply is what slows your response time. N.B.: This does not mean that you should write elliptically or bypass standard grammar, capitalization, and punctuation (unless you want to look 12 years old); just that your well-written message can and should be as concise as possible. That saves everyone time.
4. Cheat - Use something like MailTemplate to help manage answers to frequent email subjects. Templates let you create and use boilerplate responses to the questions and requests to which you usually find yourself drafting identical replies over and over from scratch. At least use a template as a basis for your response, and then customize it for that person or situation. Don’t worry—you can still let your sparkling prose and winning wit shine through, just without having to invent the wheel 10 times each day.
5. Be honest - If you know in your heart that you’re never going to respond to an email, get it out of sight, archive it, or just delete it. Guilt will not make you more responsive two months from now, otherwise, you’d just do it now, right? Trust your instincts, listen to them, and stop trying to be perfect.

Update 2005-10-18 07:33:45

Yep, you read it right: in the eightish months since I posted this, I’ve set my email to check every hour. The result? I ain’t missing much. A lot of stuff that can wait, a lot that resolves itself, and a huge mass of items that previously would have sent me on a 50-yard-dash to nothing.

Friends: stop letting your email poke you with a stick. It’s just not worth it.

via 43folders.com

I think it is time to admit that I have a massive problem with my e-mail. At the time of writing there are 9062 messages in my inbox.

OK so that last time I manually archived my INBOX was almost a year ago; but considering I delete more e-mails than not, and have folders and rules to manage others - means that I probably receive as many as 2000 e-mails per month; 500 per week and almost 100 per day.

Firstly I reckon there are only 20 e-mails per 5 working days that are meaningful (need a response or action) - the rest a combination of junk, and stuff I am cc'd in on.

So today, Sunday, I decided to revisit Merlin Mann's website 43 signals - who has lots of advice for e-mail junkies who, like me, seek out his advice to try and solve e-mail overload.

I am writing this post to publicly state that 'I Myles Davidson, have a problem; I am addicted to my e-mail'. There I've said it - phew... I really do feel better.

So as with all self-help programs I must take the first step. To this end I have just changed my auto-check to ONE HOUR. This itself, I kid you not, almost turned me into a quivering wreck. It was set, probably by default, to 5 minutes. The temptation was to go for 15 or 30 minutes but I figure I should go for an hour.

I will let you know how this turns unfolds and now I am going to start deleting (ok archiving) about 9000 e-mails. I know for some, in box 'zero' is the mantra and may this is what I secretly desire but one step at a time, right?

Please do let me know your suggestions of help, and do follow my progress via twitter (@mylesdavidson)

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