Archives for November 2008

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).

In my post on getting your email inbox to zero every day, I asked for readers to send in their questions about email and I would post on some of them this week. I’ve received a lot of great questions — thank you to everyone who has emailed their questions or put them in the comments. Now, it’s time to start posting on the questions.

The first question is from a reader named Mark: “Could you go into the logistics of email accounts? I am trying to whittle down to two accounts, one for work and another for personal use.” Mark then goes into some of the problems he’s encountered. Another reader also echoed the same things

Most of us probably have several email accounts, so this question is very relevant.

Here are some the key principles I recommend and which we will be discussing:

1. Have as many accounts as you need but as few as you can get by with.
2. Bring everything into one interface, if possible.
3. When you can’t bring everything into one interface, have a regular schedule for checking all of your accounts.
4. Be as disciplined with your personal email accounts as you are with your work email.

After discussing these principles, we’re going to discuss solutions to three problems:

1. When an account offers free POP and forwarding, but will not forward spam (hence, some legitimate email gets caught in the spam filter and is not forwarded).
2. When an account provides POP only if you pay for it.
3. How to cancel an email account while minimizing problems arising from the fact that people don’t always update their address book and that you may have a lot of website usernames to update.

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Zach Nielson recently had a helpful post on using email well. Most of the points go to the issue of what I would call “email etiquette.” Some of the best tips are: “don’t confront people over email,” “work to have a balance between email and personal contact,” “learn people’s style,” and “hesitate before hitting reply all.”

Most important: When sending to a large group, use blind copy.

A major theme of this blog is that productivity is not simply about making ourselves more productive, but making others more productive as well. Writing better emails is a big way that we can make other people’s lives a little simpler and a little better. And it will save us time as well.

Writing good emails means writing them in a way that makes it possible to understand your point right away. It means writing your email to have high impact with minimal time investment on your reader’s part.

The most influential resource on my thinking on this area is a book with the unfortunate title, The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You. Here are 3 principles for writing better emails from this book and some other resources I’ve read.

1. Make the Subject Line Specific

Make the subject line descriptive so the person knows right away what the email is about. Don’t use a headline such as “Interesting,” “Good Article,” or even just “Proposal,” because they don’t provide anything specific about the content.

Instead, a good subject line would be something like: “Proposal for New Hires in 2009.”

2. State the Required Action, or Other Purpose, First

The very first thing should be a brief greeting, such as “Hi, Fred. Good job in the meeting today.”

But then move right to your point. State your point, as specifically as possible, in 1-3 sentences. If you have ideas that you want Fred to consider, for example, say that you have ideas for him to consider and state specifically (and briefly) what your main idea is.

Don’t just say “Fred, I have some ideas for you to consider,” and then spend 3 paragraphs getting to your main idea. Instead, state specifically what your idea is. For example, say: “I think we should consider hiring an additional widget manager next year because of the planned 23% increase in production. I am wondering what your thoughts are.”

3. Give the Background Second

After you’ve stated your main point, then provide the details.

This is key, so I’ll say it again: Give your main point, and then provide the background.

This is different from a detective story, or a novel, or any other type of writing where the discovery is part of the fun. With email, there isn’t time for this. And especially when doing work email, there is a business purpose to your email. You need to save the other person’s time by telling them your point right away, and then only after that providing the details in the event that they need to see things fleshed out more.

4. Keep Your Paragraphs Short

When providing the background, keep your paragraphs short. Wall of words are hard to read. Be short and to the point. And keep it relevant. Use bullet points when possible.

4. Close by Clarifying the Next Steps

If the background section gets longer than a few paragraphs, it is a good idea to close by summarizing the action step(s) again.

5. Don’t Forward Emails Without Summarizing the Point at the Top

Last of all, a word on forwarding: If you need someone’s opinion on something, don’t simply forward them a long email thread and say “what do you think?” Instead, summarize the main action you need from them right at the top, and then summarize the main point of the email thread.

Try to make it so that all the thread is needed for is to provide the details, if the reader feels that they are necessary.

In my post yesterday on how to get your email inbox to zero, I encouraged readers to email me their questions on email and effective practices that they use. I’ll then do some posts next week answering the best questions and highlighting some of the best ideas from people.

A helpful way to illustrate my system might be to summarize how I use it to handle these email questions I receive so that I have access to them next week when I write the posts, but still have them in an organized spot in the meantime.

Here’s principle number one for me in this: I’m not keeping those emails in my inbox.

Those who read the post yesterday could probably finish this post today for me. What I did is create a new folder in with the “working folders” that I encourage people to have. The constant folders in there are “answer,” “hold,” and “read.” But you can also create temporary folders in there for support material that you need to keep on hand for a bit, or which you need to collect for a task in the coming days.

So I created a folder called “WBN Questions” in in with my other working folders. Whenever I get a question, I send a quick thanks to the person and then move the email into that folder. Next week when I write the post, I’ll go into that folder, review the questions again, pick the best ones, and write my post.

When I’m all done, I’ll delete the emails (though I never permanently empty my deleted bin, so I’ll still have them on file), and then delete this temporary support folder.

[UPDATE: The content of this post has been updated and turned into a PDF article.]

It’s possible to get your email inbox to zero every day, even if you get 100 emails a day.

And it’s not super complicated, though it does take effort and some discipline. But I don’t think lack of effort has been the main problem. I think the main problem has been not knowing how to manage email effectively.

Many people have simply never been taught the best practices for keeping email under control. For example, we can quickly fall into the trap of using our email inbox as a small to-do list (really bad), and sometimes we even end up using our inbox as a holding tank for major project items (far worse). The result is that we go through our days with a sense of having a thousand “open loops” continually before us.

The goal of this article is to outline some very simple practices that will enable you to manage your email in a way that is effective, simple, and maintains a sense of relaxed control. You should be able to take this article and use it to get your inbox from whatever point it is—even if it’s at 15,000 emails—and get it down to zero.

It shouldn’t take too long (if you have 15,000 emails, maybe you should just delete everything more than a month old and start over!). And you’ll be able to keep it there. Or, at least, if you don’t keep it there, it won’t be because you don’t know how.

Overview

We’ll cover a 5-part process for getting your email inbox to zero and keeping it there. The five areas are:

1. Setting up your email workspace
2. The rules of processing
3. How to handle the four different types of emails
4. Email filing (don’t do it)
5. Staying at zero all day long: how often should you check email?

(Here’s a pdf of this article for those who prefer reading in that format.)

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