I used to love getting emails, they were almost always from a friend to let me know about what amazing things they had been up to and asking about my life too, or maybe they were full of special offers from my favourite music shop (or a chance to win a Fender guitar). But over time that has changed. Instead of the handful I got a week, I now get a handful every morning, afternoon and a couple of handfuls while I sleep (this is what I get for connecting with Americans but living in Europe). The joy of email has been sapped by the emails informing me that I have a new friend request on whatever the latest social network is, or that this pill will enhance my…well you know…
The worst part isn’t the growth in junk emails, it’s the growth in email. You see, I was at school then and no school used email to contact their students back then, but now I get email from work, email from my side projects, email from my family, email from my friends, email from my bank and so on. The sheer quantity of good and bad email just makes it harder, and honestly, I haven’t been the best at managing my email.
Maybe your the same and you’ve almost given up hope? Well if you are feeling that way I hope you’ll join me in an experiment to identify the errors you make with email and form an action plan to solve them.
I’m going to go over some of the ways which I don’t handle email well, what the underlying reason for that is (for me) and then my action plan to solve it. Some of these may directly help you if you are the absolute same, or indirectly help you (by letting you identify an issue or reason for your poor email management) or they may not help you but the thought process can help you. Whatever it is I hope you will also share your issues with email (past and present) and what you have and are doing to tackle them.
Junk
The first issue is plain junk email! Yuk! Unfortunately, many companies can find ways to find out your contact details and then start sending you messages about random products or with “opportunities” from Nigerian princes (some even dress up as Christian missionaries). This is a pain and although there are some very good junk filters, some spam can get through.
This is an issue I’m actually pretty good with dealing with. I see if there is an unsubscribe option, add the company/details to filters that send it straight to the bin and delete the email. Services like Gmail (and Apple Mail) can help you set up rules to filter your email over keywords or who is sending them.
Old Mailing Lists
One of the most awkward issues for me is old mailing lists. These are things which I signed up for and once loved. Their advice seamed so fresh, so useful and really helped me. How on earth could I just unsubscribe after all the value they’ve given me? Maybe things will turn around soon and it is still an important issue they talk about…right?
Sometimes it’s true but in my experience, that is the minority. I’ve got a lot better at doing one of two options. If I find myself deleting every email they send for a prolonged period of time (depends on how frequently they publish content for that) then I will just unsubscribe. If I occasionally read their content, then I will try to get on either a roundup mailing list (or less frequent one), or use the unroll me service and read their items in that group bundle of emails. That means I get one email instead of five from five different groups.
A final option I’ve considered using more is looking for other ways to follow these sites which I don’t read often. This includes RSS, Twitter lists or Flipboard.
Good Mailing Lists
Strange as it may sound, I can actually be worse with good mailing lists that send me things I want to read than ones which send me things I don’t want to read. The problem is that email is not a place for reading things, it’s a place for processing things and reading stops me from doing that. An email with a captivating title often makes me leave it alone so I can read it “later” (except later frequently turns into never).
My action plan for this was to set up a read later service (Pocket, in my case, but Evernote and Instapaper are good alternatives) and send new items to read there. Then add a task to my todo app of choice (in fact Todoist now does this automagically thanks to IFTTT) to read those items later. I also scheduled time in my day and week to read items in my read it later service. That way my inbox is clear, I have a solid time for reading things and I’m using my todo list more effectively.
Reference Material
Occasionally, something comes in which I will need in the future. This could be a bill, invoice, important message or a document outlining a program. In the past I’d keep these in my inbox so I could easily get at them (which was ironic because there would soon be hundreds of emails just like that and so I’d have to scroll).
Now I do two things, the first is to add them to Evernote using either dispatch, Cloud Magic on my phone or tablet, or using IFTTT and a special tab on my computer. I also archive the email on Gmail. That way I still keep the original (because some people get very fussy about that) but I have an easily searchable record on Evernote too.
2 Minutes or Less Questions
Sometimes these little questions or requests come in that require two minutes or less to do. I try to do these straight away in David Allen GTD style. Being honest, this is easy for the fun things but for the difficult or uncomfortable issues, they manage to slip through the gap. The best solution I have found for this is to buck up, remind myself that it only needs a couple of minutes and try to push myself through.
I can’t say I’m 100% successful, but it helps. This is one of the hardest changes I’m making as it’s an attitude change to resist the urge to procrastinate.
Long Responses Needed
The worst thing is an long email which asks a complicated question on a sensitive topic. Knowing that the wording has to be just right and that it will take a while to write certainly aids procrastination. It’s a high energy task, with little reward but high risk as well (okay sometimes it just takes a while when I could be doing more fun things like playing with LEGO).
To help, I add this as a task to my task manager with the contexts of high energy and email and I set a short deadline. That means I will be prompted to do the task at the right time (due to seeing all my tasks for that context when I should be doing them). It also means that I can “game myself” but promising myself that once the high energy tasks are over, then my workload becomes easier, and I can have a mini reward for doing the high energy tasks.
This has helped but when it goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong. Such as setting a due date later than the other person believes it needs and so getting a second more irate message asking for an immediate response. Or coming to the end of the day and seeing the notification that I still have to send that message. I’m also lucky that I don’t get too many of these emails, if I did then I’d probably have to schedule some time for replying to these message.
What Are Your Issues?
These are just a few things that I’ve struggled with and a few methods I’ve been trying to use to overcome them. I certainly haven’t followed my advice to the letter and still make mistakes but it has helped me a lot with my emails. I’d love to know what types of emails you struggle with, why you struggle with them and how you have tried to deal with them.
[Del key image via Vitor Sá Photo via Compfight cc, inbox cartoon image via 10ch via Compfight cc and inbox zero patch fixedgear via Compfight cc]
Eric Dye says
I like the idea of weeding through the quick responses, deletes and archives.