August 5, 2009 — goodtravel

If you’re reading this post, most likely email plays a major role in your life. Between work and your friends, you get at least 100 emails a day (or more, like me). Whenever you’re on the computer, you leave your email up and get alerted whenever a new message comes in. That chiming noise that you hear every five minutes starts to fade into the background and isn’t really even an alert anymore…it’s just standard!

It’s ok to admit that email dominates you. Afterall, admiting you have a problem is the first step. 😉 It is important to recognize that your email inbox can be an effective tool yet can also be detrimental to productivity if you don’t use it right. I would like to share my evolved process of email management that has taught me some major lessons in not only organization but task management, as well.

Lesson 1: Don’t keep your to-do emails in your inbox!

“I need to take care of this. I’ll leave this in my inbox as a reminder to do that later.” -Joe Schmoe.



Do you ever handle your emails this way? For the longest time, my “Inbox” = “Inbox” + “To-Dos”. I learned very quickly that this causes major problems with clutter and disorganization. I used to keep my inbox full of random emails that I’ve looked at but “will get to later”. However, over time you get more and more emails that pile up on top of each other. One minute you get an email from a co-worker, the next minute you’re getting an email newsletter to check out the latest sales at your favorite shopping online store. Email after email, you still try to remember that you have to get back to that email from earlier that day. Sure, you may be good at checking your inbox frequently, then two days pass… and then a week, and the email inbox is now at 900 emails full–and you never got back to your nagging co-worker that emailed you a week ago (which is probably the reason why they’re nagging you)!

I’ve heard too many times people say “I finally got my inbox down to under 100 emails!”. So I ask, is that 100 to-do’s? Or is that 15 to-do’s buried within 85 cluttered emails around it? They all BLEND in together and it’s hard to find those tasks. Also, which is more important today vs. tomorrow? How would you tell with 100 emails anyway?

Why waste your time sorting through such a mess? Don’t keep your email to-dos in your inbox!

Lesson 2: Flagging your emails can help, but the clutter still gets in the way!

Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, and most all email clients web or client-based give you the opportunity to “Flag, “Tag” or “Star” an email. Some email clients allow you to create custom priorities and categories.

Does that help? Let’s say you have have 100 emails in your inbox and 15 are tagged as to-do’s. Sure no problem, it’s only 15 emails to look for. But what if you have 500 emails in your inbox? Now you have to scroll down a long list or many pages of 500+ emails to find those “tagged” emails to locate the ones you are looking for. Then, after completing the task, you have to remember to UNtag it. Frequently, I would forget to do this and then the 15 out of 500 tagged items would eventually turn into 50 out 500 starred items. Now, you REALLY don’t have a clear idea as to what is a to-do out of this cluttered inbox.

Lesson 3: Organizing your emails into folders will help… but that doesn’t solve all of the problems!

So, I decided “Ok, it’s time to get organized. I’m going to create folders to save all these emails”.

I created folders by topic or category and then stored those emails that I just want to “save” in them. This kept less emails in the inbox by moving those stored emails into those designated folders.

I still had a problem. Sure, I moved over the ‘saved’ messages, but my to-do emails were still mixed in with emails ‘coming in’. So this quickly lead me into another method I tried that worked pretty well.

I created a folder structure like this:

* Work To-Do

* Personal To-Do

* Saved

This is keeping it simple with only three folders. All my to-dos were put into a To-Do folder, depending on work or personal. Then all saved messages went into the Saved folder. The Saved folder could have sub-folders if necessary.

The point was to keep ALL EMAILS out of the inbox. So at any given time, the inbox should be completely empty. This means, once I received an email, I took action or immediately moved that into the “Saved” folder or to one of the To-Do folders. Sure, that worked great. Everything was organized, the inbox is always empty unless a new email came in. No clutter!

However, when times get busy, I would forget to actually LOOK into that Work To-Do email folder and then all of the sudden, 2 days had passed and I still never completed that task.

In addition, I started thinking, “why even have a “Saved” folder”? If you use Gmail, everything is archived anyway and it has such a great search feature built in (and most other email clients) that I shouldn’t need to use “Saved” folders. My current method was keeping me from being as responsive as I had hoped.

Lesson 4: Email MUST have an action item on a To-Do List! If not, archive or delete it.

So the system worked for a while, but needed some tweaking for those times when things got busy and I would forget to check that to-do folder. I adjusted my workflow to make sure that EVERY email I got that required an action was moved into a to-do list! This seriously means each one of them. Why? Because you can then ORGANIZE and PRIORITIZE your tasks, which mailbox folders do not give you the capacity to do.

Your mailbox of to-dos should only be references for email threads and conversations. They should not dictate your to-do list. This is important since many emails include multiple tasks.

If an action could not be created from it, then I archived or deleted it. End of story. I found that I would probably only go back to see about 5% of the emails that I really saved. The others were just sitting in the Saved folder as a waste of space.

My friend Chinie Diaz (@chiniehdiaz), posted this article the other day:

Why Your Email Inbox Is NOT a Good To-do List [Zen Habits]

This article was great because it pointed out the technical reasons as to why your email account should not and cannot function as your To-Do list. To sum it up, here are the 5 reasons she lists:

1. You can’t change the subject lines.

2. There might be multiple actions in each email.

3. You can’t re-order the emails (usually).

4. You can’t prioritize your to-dos.

5. An email inbox contains distractions.

Lesson 5: Find a Task Management Tool that works for you

So what Tasks or To-do list tools should you use? Well, that could be a whole other topic on its own but for the sake of this blog (and your eyes because this one in particular is a tad bit long) I’m discussing only a few. What I use currently is Remember the Milk. I think it’s fantastic because you can do a lot to manage your to-dos. You have the ability to create different categories for tasks and tag your tasks to make it searchable and organized. You can save notes, too which I typically use to copy and paste email threads or URLs into.

One unique option is that you can share tasks with other users on Remember the Milk. I have convinced some of my co-workers to use it at work. My wife also signed up to start using it so that we can share our house to-do’s (but maybe that was a mistake on my part)!

My favorite feature is the ability to forward your emails to an address which will automatically create tasks. This is great if you’re away from your computer or don’t have time at the moment to add the new task to your list.

There are other Task Management tools out there. I have heard of Things for Mac being pretty good and there are a bunch of tools based off of GTD (Getting Things Done), as well. A simple tool that just came out is Google Tasks, which can integrate with your Google Calendar and Gmail. If not that, then use PLAIN PAPER! Sometimes I retreat to the old-fashioned paper and pencil to keep it simple.

Conclusion:

Remember, every email should have some action to it. Read your email, put the task on your to-do list, then put it in your to-do folder. If you don’t choose to keep them in your to-do folder, archive or delete it!

This system of email management (that has taken me SO LONG to formulate) has worked very well for me. However, I am always open to new ideas to improve the way I do things.

Do you have any struggles with email management and productivity? Have you tried any of these methods on your own? Do you have any advice or methods that you would like to share? I’d love to hear your feedback!