No productivity approach or email approach can always be followed perfectly. A necessary element of any good approach is the ability to adapt even when things aren’t going smoothly and you have to break the rules.

As we’ve been discussing with email, I recommend totally clearing out the working folders (“answer,” “hold,” and “read”) at least once a day. The importance of this lies in the fact that if you don’t empty them regularly, they are just going to become another open loop that stays on your mind (and you’ll fall behind).

However, one of the values of these folders is that they enable you to easily adapt to the situation when you simply don’t have time to do much email for a series of days. This happens to all of us.

It happened to me just this week. I just moved last weekend, and then immediately had to head off to a conference on Tuesday. This has made time for email very scarce.

In times like this, it’s OK to go a few days without totally clearing out each of the folders. In fact, in these situations the folders become almost more valuable. They enable you to still keep you inbox at zero (since it doesn’t have to take too long to process your email into them), and then zero in on the ones that are most important. You can then deal with the most important ones so that they don’t fall through the cracks, and leave the rest for when you do have time.

The important thing is to not let this go on for too long and not to do it too often.

That is so important that I’m going to repeat it: It’s OK to let your working folders build up for a few days, but make sure to get them cleared out again as soon as possible. If you get in the habit of letting emails sit in those folders for extended periods of time, you lose a lot of the clarity and reduction in drag that this approach brings.

I’m sitting here at the airport getting my working folders cleared out right now. Unfortunately, I had a ridiculously early flight this morning and with everything else going on just said to myself “it’s not worth it.” But the next available flight was 4 hours later — more of a delay than I would have liked. But the good thing is that this just opened up a window of time to get those working folders cleared out so I can go into the weekend back to normal.

Several people have asked this over the last few days.  The short answer is that I treat sent items the same way I treat deleted items — I don’t organize them, but just let them remain in their folder permanently in the event that I need to refer to one in the future. If I do need to access one down the road, I simply use the search. If my sent items gets too full, I archive it.

If there is an email that I send that will be of long-term use, whether because it defines a policy or it articulates some thoughts that I want to keep handy, then I save the email into my “Documents” folder and organize it along with the rest of my electronic files. If it seems easier, then sometimes instead of saving the email itself, I’ll paste the contents into a Word document and then save that.

There are about two principles guiding my thinking here:

1. Conservation of time. I find that the frequency with which I look back at my sent items isn’t sufficient to warrant the time to organize them.
2. Consolidation of content. When there is something I will need for significant ongoing future reference, it is simpler to have all of those files in one spot rather than two. So I keep all such files in “Documents,” rather than Word/Office files in “Documents” and emails in email folders.

Here are some further thoughts on that last point: The way in which something was created (whether by email or some other program) is not relevant to the way in which it should be organized. What’s important is the content.

Keeping all like content together is more important than keeping all emails together. So long-term emails get filed in “Documents” with other Word and Excel and etc. documents that pertain to that particular department or topic. (And again, I am very, very selective about which emails I file into “Documents.”)

I don’t believe in being down on email and complaining about how much email we receive (although on a bad day it can be tempting). Keeping on top of your email is a way of serving people.

But, except in rare instances, email is not the primary task of your job. There are many other things you need to be doing, and email already takes up enough time. So it is smart to do what you can to reduce your email volume and thus make sure, as much as possible, that you aren’t spending unnecessary time on email.

The way to reduce email volume is simple: Send less email, send better emails, and use meetings effectively.

1. Send Less Email

As with most things in life, the first place to look is not to external factors, but to ourselves. Email tends to create more email. Send less and you will receive less.

The unfortunately titled but helpful book The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You (just ignore their advice they give on filing email) notes that this is supported by research:

Research shows that for every five emails you receive, three require a response. This means that for every five emails we send, people send back three. I call this the boomerang effect. So if you eliminate just one out of every five outgoing emails, you’ll begin to receive roughly 12% fewer emails (p. 17).

How do you send less email? Here are some things you can do.

Ask Yourself: “Is this Email Truly Necessary?”

This is the highest impact thing that you can do. I’ve been guilty of sending off emails that articulate an idea I’m half-way thinking about, only to put in motion a premature discussion that sucks up time unnecessarily. The discussion was unnecessary because the issue didn’t need to be discussed yet, and there weren’t enough details to come to an effective conclusion. The best approach in these instances is: wait.

There are lots of other types of unnecessary emails. The fundamental thing to do here is to put yourself in your recipient’s shoes. Think of all that they probably have on their plate for the day and all the other emails that they are getting. Then ask, “Is this email going to be worth their time in light of everything else that they have going on?” You might realize that the email is actually unnecessary, or that what you actually need to do is clarify and sharpen the email (that is, write a better email — on which, see below).

Limit Use of Reply All

When you are one of many recipients, your default should be to respond only to the sender, rather than to everyone. So often we do the opposite. Only hit “reply all” if you’ve consciously concluded that it is truly necessary.

Limit Use of CC:

Most “cc:’s” are impositions on people’s time. To cc: someone breaks the rule of being clear as to the purpose for which you are sending the email to the person. What is the person supposed to do with this? Just “keep it on their radar?” They have 1,000 other things going on. Often, a cc: ends up being an accidental way of “jumping the cue” (see next point).

I don’t want to say that it is never necessary to cc: someone. Just keep it to a minimum.

Don’t Jump the Cue, Except with Praise

When you are working with someone on an issue and they aren’t in line with you the way you want, don’t email their boss. Even with a simple “update.” Keep working with the person. If you do need to talk about things at a higher level, mutually agree on that.

The biggest way this mistake happens is through the cc: function. You’ve been dialoguing with person X on subject A, and after a while decide to add the person above them in the “cc:” field so they can “get up to speed” with the discussion. Don’t do this. It takes up unnecessary time on the part of the person copied, and the person you’ve been dialoguing with is not going to be too happy.

The one time that you should jump the cue is with praise. If person X has done a great job on something, then it is a great idea to email their boss and cc: them, or to email them with a cc: to their boss. This is something everyone will appreciate.

Limit Use of FYI

This is highly related to the principle of limiting the instances in which you cc: people. Many cc:’s are FYI’s, and just like most cc:’s are unnecessary, so are most FYI’s.

Now, not all FYI’s are unnecessary. You just need to do it right. Instead of forwarding someone a long discussion thread to “update them,” for example, send them a one sentence email you write yourself that gives them the essence of things.

People appreciate real updates like that — updates that truly update them in a quick sentence or two. But they don’t appreciate long discussion threads that they have to wade through in order to figure out what “update” you want them to have.

2. Send Better Emails

So the first principle of getting less emails is to send less emails. The second principle is also in your control: Send better emails.

Why We Often Don’t Send Better Emails

The biggest problem with email is that the cost to the sender is low, but the cost to the recipient is high. It takes almost no effort, for example, to type up a lengthy, 750 word email and ask the person “what do you think?” or some other action (or muddled set of multiple actions). So the sender has it easy, but the receiver might then stuck with a wall of text to read and ambiguous actions to clarify.

When the cost of something is low, you get more of it. When the cost is high, you get less of it. The problem here is that the low cost is on the receiver’s end. So the tendency is to create more emails, and the receiver then bears the cost of those. Since the cost is largely on the recipient’s end, the sender does not feel that and hence does not adjust his behavior accordingly.

How to Send Better Emails

The solution is to make a conscious attempt to think from the other’s perspective. Since you don’t bear the cost of the email, be intentional about considering the cost your email will impose on the other person.

As mentioned above, sometimes this will mean not sending the email. Many times it will mean sending a better email. I won’t go into that here since I posted on this earlier this week. So for an outline of what it means to send better emails, see “How to Write Better Emails.”

However, let me add here two things that I failed to mention in that article: The concepts of EOM and NRN.

The Concepts of EOM and NTN

First, if you can fit your whole message in your subject line, do it. Then, end the subject line with “EOM,” which means “end of message.” This indicates to your recipient that they don’t need to take the time to open the email. They’ve seen everything in the subject line. Delete and move on.

Second, start adding “NRN” at the end of your emails. “NRN” means “no reply needed.” This relieves the recipient of the burden of having to know if you expect a verification that they received your email.

For example, if you send someone a rough idea about this or that, it might be best to close with “NRN” so the person knows that you don’t expect them to take the time to build on or develop the idea. You’re just updating them on a direction of thought you are having, but there is no need to develop it yet.

Or if you send a report, there probably isn’t a need for the recipient to take the time to say “thanks, got it.” Save your recipient’s time by making crystal clear that they don’t need to do this. NRN.

3. Use Meetings Effectively

Last of all, another fundamental way to receive less emails (and send less emails!) is to use meetings effectively.

The connection between email volume and ineffective meetings does not seem to be realized very often. But one of the reasons our email volume is so high is because we are trying to take care of things by email that are better taken care of in person.

The irony is that when we are in meetings, we often feel that the meeting is “taking time away from our real work,” by which we (without knowing it) mean the time to send and receive all the emails we wouldn’t need to deal with if we were just using that meeting effectively.

Patrick Lencioni states this brilliantly in his excellent book Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business (pages 251-252):

Most executives I know spend hours sending e-mail, leaving voice mail, and roaming the halls to clarify issues that should have been made clear in a meeting in the first place. [Lencioni calls this “sneaker time.”] But no one accounts for this the way they do when they add up time spent in meetings.

I have no doubt that sneaker time is the most subtle, dangerous, and underestimated black hole in corporate America. …

Remarkably, because sneaker time is mixed in with everything else during the day, we fail to see it as a single category of wasted time. It never ceases to amaze me when I see executives checking their watches at the end of a meeting and lobbying the CEO for it to end so they can ‘go do some real work.’

In so many cases, the ‘real work’ they’re referring to is going back to their offices to respond to e-mail and voice mail that they’ve received only because so many people are confused about what needs to be done.

So one of the reasons that we have so much email is because we fail to use meetings effectively. Ironically, we then want to get out of meetings so that we can do all the email that wouldn’t have been necessary if we had run the meeting correctly.

There is a lot to be said about meetings, and I will be doing a bunch of posts on meetings as this blog goes on. For now, realize that one of the fundamental ways of decreasing email volume is to run better meetings.

What Tips Do You Have?

I’ve suggested three ways to reduce email volume: Send less email, write better emails, and use meetings effectively.

What are some tips you have for reducing email volume? What do you do to send less email? How do you write better emails? What things do you do that I haven’t mentioned?

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.

[Read more…]

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.)

[Read more…]

I just posted above a detailed article I’ve written on how to get your email inbox to zero every day. The process works really well. I find it entirely doable to get my inbox to zero at least once a day, with the exception of days when I’m away from my computer or when I shut email down to focus on large projects, and in spite of receiving some pretty complicated emails.

(Although this doesn’t mean that there are never any days, or weeks even, when you need to let things go completely haywire, or just say “enough!,” which I think is just fine from time to time — more on that in future posts.)

Now, the article certainly doesn’t answer all questions that can arise. In addition, I’m really interested in hearing what approaches you have found effective in dealing with email.

So here’s what I think will be most interesting of all:

Send me (or put in the comments) your questions on email. Send the toughest ones you can think of, especially anything that has been a consistent snag to you, or any unanswered questions from the article. I’ll then do a post next week giving my answers to the most puzzling and most helpful questions and we can also discuss them further in the comments if desired.

Send me (or put in the comments) some of the email strategies and tactics that you’ve found most effective, and I’ll feature the most interesting or useful ones in some posts.