Killing the Giant

I HATE email. Absolutely despise having to use it at all, ever.

Unfortunately the majority of us are stuck using it for work and even personal projects as our main form of communication. I am not a fan of whoever standardized the use of email. But we’re stuck with it, so here is how we can win.

First, the problems with email:

Distraction

If you keep your email up all day, or if you have it set to give you a notification on your phone and/or computer that means it will interrupt whatever you are doing to let you know Target is having a huge sale on socks…

Miscommunication

Moods, intentions, sarcasm can all be lost in the written word. Especially ones that are time sensitive. The majority of us aren’t Shakespeare…

Slow response times

Email was never meant to take the place of a conversation. It is normal to wait a day or even two for a response to an email…

Unproductive

These three problems with email make it an unproductive tool a lot of the time… But it can be fixed.

Lets first start off by agreeing that an inbox should never ever be used as a todo list. That makes absolutely no sense. It’s a communication point. Using your inbox as a todo list just as bad as not having a todo list at all.

Todo lists NEED to be centralized. Sometimes tasks come from conversations, phone calls, etc. Using your inbox as a todo means you can’t add tasks that come from other places, unless you email yourself, but if you’re doing that you have a lot of other problems to figure out…

Email is to:

Make introductions – Being able to CC someone on an email is a great tool for making introductions to people in your network.
Inform – Got resources to share? Need to let someone know about an event? Email is a great tool to get your information in front of people.
Schedule – Need to schedule meetings with a large group of people? Email is good at keeping everyone in the loop, as long as people read it.

Email is like a bacteria, if it’s not killed it multiplies in your inbox till your stressed out because there is no order and you don’t know where to begin.

Steps to killing the giant:

Limit the amount of times you check your inbox

Less can really mean more. Email was never meant to be a consistent conversation. Ongoing conversations usually don’t take place over snail mail, and neither should they in email.

Take your email off your phone, or at least turn off the constant notifications.

I check my email 3 times a day. When I get to work, 30 mins before lunch, and 30 mins before the end of the day. That’s it.

Develop a system to handling email

My inbox is completely zeroed 3 times a day, each time I check it. That is because I have a system for dealing with each email that arrives in my inbox. I have 3 choices each time I get an email: Delete it, Task it, or Archive it.

Delete it

If there is no action that I need to take and I don’t need the information for future reference, I send it straight to the trash.

Task it

This is for email that needs action. It gets converted to a task in our teams task management system.

We use Asana to handle our projects and tasks. Assign a person to handle the task along with a due date and project it is applied to. Use important portions of the body of the email to give background to the task so you don’t forget it when the tasks pops up in your teams todo list.

Then, my favorite part, delete the email.

Archive it

If the email is related to a project or is something of importance, but does not need action then it gets archived.

I use Evernote to archive all important emails, or email that I may need to reference at a future date/time. It has a very strong search functionality that has saved me more than once. Once a note is created with the email content, filed under a project and tagged accordingly; then the email gets deleted.

That’s it. That is how I kill the email giant 3 times a day.