Handling Email on the iPhone and Other Mobile Devices

Another one of the most common questions I received on email this week was about how to coordinate my email system from “How to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day” with mobile devices like the iPhone.

The Problem

Mobile devices provide really useful portability and convenience. But they also create two challenges:

  1. You can’t (easily, at least) process the longer-than-two-minute emails into the working folders (action, hold, read).
  2. Even if you could do this easily, the nature of the situation is usually that if you are checking email on your mobile device, you probably don’t have time to process everything anyway.

And of course there are other challenges as well, such as the fact that if an email requires more than a few sentences of response, you probably don’t want to type that up on the small keyboard or screen.

The Solution

The solution comes from applying a few productivity principles.

The first principle is realism. It truly does not work well to process email on a portable device. So don’t try to do it. Recognize that mobile devices are not intended to serve as your primary tool for email. Instead, see your mobile device as a means for keeping up with important emails when you are on the go. It’s fine to go into your inbox on your mobile device, see what is most important or needs an immediate (quick) response or action, taking care of those, and leaving the rest. This is not ideal, but it is realistic.

After you do deal with an email on your mobile device, delete it right away (unless you need to file it permanently in Documents). Also delete right when you see them any emails that don’t need any attention, such as a newsletter you don’t plan to read.

The result is that you will have an inbox that now contains some half-read emails that you’ve opened, then decided to leave and move on from. This is productivity anarchy. But the key to any productivity system is for it to be flexible enough to handle the fact that things do sometimes get messy.

The important thing is simply not to leave things that way, which is the second principle. What you need to do is just continue to follow the principle of having at least one time each day — back at your computer — when you fully process your email and zero everything out. At this time you will clean up all those loose ends that you left open in your inbox on your mobile device.

You might even do this as soon as you get back to your computer. Or, you could do this first thing the following morning. The key is simply to have at least one time each day where you zero everything out. Which is exactly what I recommended in the article, whether you use a mobile device or not.

In other words, if you follow the system I outlined in the article, you don’t really need to do anything special to adapt to the mobile problem. Simply by processing all of your inbox at least once a day at your computer, you’ll clean up all the open loops left in your inbox from when you checked it on your mobile device.

This is really important, so let me restate this as clearly as I can: Don’t carry your mobile habits over to your computer when you get back. You get to “break the rules” on a mobile device because there is no other way. But once you are at your computer, you need to be right back on the wagon of processing all of your inbox each time that you process any of your inbox. You might wait to do this until the next morning, or you might do it right away when you are back at your computer, but when you go back into your inbox on your computer, process everything down to zero.

Finally, after I have my inbox back down to zero, here’s the last thing I do. I hate having that circle with a number in it show up on the Mail app on my iPhone (it just represents open loops that need to be closed). So I go into my Mail app and allow all of my inboxes on my iPhone to sync up so that my iPhone now reflects the zero inbox.

The Two Sentence Summary

Last week when a friend of mine emailed me this same question, and I sent him back a real quick paragraph summarizing the above. I just took another look at that, and I think I can boil everything down to two sentences.

Here they are: Use your iPhone to get emails that you need to keep up with because of their urgency when you’re away from your computer for the day or afternoon. But then when you’re back at your computer later that day or the next morning, clean everything up and get it to normal (that is, zero).

No related posts.

November 13, 2008 | Filed Under Email | 6 Comments 

Comments

6 Responses to “Handling Email on the iPhone and Other Mobile Devices”

  1. Dave Schlottman on November 16th, 2008 8:08 pm

    Matt, one thing that I have found to be effective in dealing with email on an iPhone is to setup my email accounts to use IMAP rather than POP3. That way, when I touch an email and either file it or delete it, I am done with it and I won’t experience redownloading it to the inbox on my computer’s email account. Gmail, MobileMe, and many other email providers support IMAP. Just my 2 cents.

  2. Matt on November 17th, 2008 5:47 pm

    Dave: Great advice. I agree totally. I will be more clear on suggesting IMAP instead of POP3 on the iPhone.

  3. James on November 18th, 2008 9:09 am

    Good advice, Matt.

    But surely the *first* first principle should be to ask, “Do I even need to do this? Do I *really* need to check my email on my mobile device?” If not, don’t do it. Don’t even set it up! You’ll end up processing items more than once, which is one of the cardinal sins of GTD.

    But if your work really requires it, a good alternative to IMAP if you use a web-based email account like Gmail, is to use their interface for mobile devices (if they provide one). Google for “Gmail mobile” or “Gmail iPhone” for more info.

  4. Matt on November 21st, 2008 7:45 am

    James: Good alternative. The people that I know who use the Gmail interface for mobile devices seem to be happy with it.

  5. Loren Kutsko on January 1st, 2009 6:52 am

    Matt, I really appreciated your original article on this. I changed my entire system and have sent it to many at my organization, Food for the Hungry (www.fh.org) because there is huge need.

    What I found, however, on the mobile front, is that once I implemented the system you outlined, processing my inbox into the working folders (using IMAP) became a snap. Which is why I was surprised to read this, “You can’t (easily, at least) process the longer-than-two-minute emails into the working folders (action, hold, read).”

    It may be that I’m misunderstanding what that sentence means. I agree that once I get the longer-than-two-minute emails into the “To Respond” folder, for example, that they are best left until I get back to my computer. But, I have found that the iPhone is great for processing them into that working folder in the first place.

    The last thing I wanted to ask is if you’ve heard of these guys: http://www.manager-tools.com or not? I found their site about a year ago and their podcasts have helped me develop my management and organizational skills immensely. And you guys share a lot of the same recommended books.

    Peace.

  6. Matt on January 4th, 2009 12:15 pm

    Loren,

    I’m glad the article was helpful and useful! You make a great point, and I should nuance that statement more. I agree that it is easy on the iPhone to move emails into folders — which adds a good efficiency to processing email on the iPhone.

    I run into an unwanted complexity with the folders, even with IMAP. I use Mac Mail on my computer, and use IMAP to bring my email accounts (gMail, work, and one other) into there as well as onto my iPhone.

    The way things work out is that I can’t have a “universal” set of working folders on my iPhone that is available to each account. Instead, each account has distinct folders that then sync to my Mac mail separately. And for one of my accounts I haven’t been able to get those folders to sync into my Mac Mail at all.

    It may simply be that there is something I am overlooking here, and this can be resolved easily. But that’s part of the complexity I’m getting at — though I would now want to add that other people may not have similar complexities, and it may indeed be simple for them in all respects.

    For those who don’t have this complexity that I’m running into, I think you are making a great point that it would be a very useful best practice to go ahead and process the emails into the working folders right from the iPhone, and then clear those out back at the computer.

    On your other question: I haven’t heard of manger-tools.com. Thanks for the recommendation — I’ll check them out!

Leave a Reply