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How to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day (Updated)

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In 2008 Matt Perman wrote a popular post called “How to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day.” Nearing 8 years old and originally clocking in at 5,700 words, this material was due for an update.

Here’s the updated article, now in an easier to read PDF format.

Whether you’ve actively refined your email system for years or you’ve never thought much about it, this crash-course article covers the essential principles for managing email more effectively. Topics include setting up your email workspace, rules for processing email, best practices for archiving, and more.

Apply these principles consistently and you’ll multiply the time you have for doing other good work.

Download “How to Get Your Inbox to Zero Every Day.”

Emailing with Empathy

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This is a great post at the 99U. It starts:

When speaking face-to-face, it’s the verbal and nonverbal social cues that allow us to gauge the best way to arrange our wording in order to get our point across clearly. In email, we don’t get such real-time feedback. Once our message is in the hand of the recipient, we’ve lost all control.

This, of course, often leads to miscommunications, guessed intentions, and a total unawareness of whether an email was typed in red-faced anger or while sipping a martini by a pool. What really leads to those miscommunications is a lack of empathy….

“The most important thing is understanding each other’s language,” founder Drew D’Agostino said. “It’s not me completely adapting the way I communicate with you, but being aware and considerate of how you communicate best. Everybody’s different, and if we can just learn to recognize the communication styles of each other we can create much clearer interactions and productive communications.”

So how do we write emails that enable empathy—especially with people we might have never met in person before? And how can we be more empathetic when reading the emails of others? We asked D’Agostino to share Crystal’s best tips on how to bring more empathy to emails; both in the ones we receive and in the ones we send.

Read the whole thing.

Tim Challies on Taming the Email Beast

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Tim Challies’ series on productivity has him talking about email today. This part towards the beginning is hilarious, and does a good job of showing just how bad some of our email practices are by drawing a comparison with the physical mail:

DOING EMAIL BADLY

To better understand why so many of us do email so badly, let’s draw a comparison to a real-world object: your mailbox. Imagine if you treated your actual, physical mailbox like you treat your email. Here’s how it would go:

You walk outside to check your mail and reach into your mailbox. Sure enough, you’ve got some new mail. You take out one of your letters, open it up and begin to read it. You get about halfway through, realize it is not that interesting, stuff it back inside the envelope, and put it back in the mailbox. “I’ll deal with this one later.” You open the next letter and find that it is a little bit more interesting, but you do the same thing—stuff it back into the envelope and put it back inside the mailbox. Other mail you pull out and don’t even bother reading—it just goes straight back inside the mailbox. And sure enough, your mailbox is soon crammed full of a combination of hundreds of unopened and unread letters plus hundreds of opened and read or partially-read letters.

But it gets worse. You don’t just use your mailbox to receive and hold letters, but also to track your calendar items. You reach in deep and pull out a handful of papers with important dates and events written on them, including a few that have come and gone without you even noticing or remembering. And, of course, you also use your mailbox as a task list, so you’ve got all kinds of post-it notes in there with your to-do items scrawled all over them.

But we aren’t done yet. Even though you feel guilty and kind of sick every time you open your mailbox, you still find yourself checking your mail constantly. Fifty or sixty times a day you stop whatever else you are doing, you venture down the driveway, and reach your hand inside to see if there is anything new.

It is absurd, right? Your life would be total chaos. And yet that is exactly how most people treat their email. It is chaotic with no rules or procedures to control it. What do you need? You need a system.

He then goes on to give a simple but highly effective system for managing your email. He nails all of the core principles, such as the fact that an inbox is only for receiving email — not storing it –, the basic email workflow, and more.

Read the whole thing.

Getting Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day on Moody Radio South Florida

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I’ve started doing a weekly conversation on productivity on “Fresh Start with Eric and Audrey,” which airs on Moody Radio South Florida 6 am – 9 am ET each weekday. My segment typically airs on Tuesday mornings at 7:45 am ET.

During this time (usually about 5 minutes), we talk about various topics in productivity from a biblical perspective. The first one was today, and you can listen to the recording online. We talked about why productivity matters at all, and some basic concepts for managing email.

Over the next few weeks, we will talk a bit more about email, as well as about organizing space and multitasking.

Eric and Audrey are a lot of fun to talk to, and I’m really enjoying these segments!

You can continue to tune in each Tuesday morning at 7:45, directly at 89.3 FM if you live in south Florida, or by listening to the live stream online. (To hear the archives, just click on the “Fresh Start” banner.)

The Relationship Between Processing Workflow and How My Creative Process Works

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I’m getting my email to zero right now (a bit late in the day), and came across a great example of how productivity is not just about getting as many things done as quickly as you can, but generating ideas and even taking some potential rabbit trails.

So, here’s how I work. I’m going through my messages one by one, determining the next actions and what responses are needed to each. One of these emails is yesterday’s blog post by Seth Godin on a new marketing class he is offering at Skillshare.

So, what’s the next action on that email? Just read it, decide I don’t have time for the class, and move on? That would be the efficiency model of productivity, which I reject.

Instead, with this email I sat back and asked myself some questions and observations like these:

  • What does Seth’s blog post here teach us about how we should craft and present ideas in general? Godin is clearly a master at this. A blog post from him announcing a new course he is offering is not just an opportunity to decide whether to take the course or not; it’s an opportunity to learn about communication. 
  • So in that vein, I notice that he talks about the course “changing the way you think about marketing.” Is that way of speaking just a way to get attention? Talk about change, so people will listen? Godin is a person of integrity; he speaks what he believes, rather than making things up just to get a response. Further, in my experience (confirmed more and more every day), things absolutely do need to be changed. This is actually the task of leadership: changing things. We live in a fallen world. So much is indeed sub-par and not helping people. To talk in terms of change is not just a way to “market” an idea. Things really do need to be changed. So I make a mental note that here is yet more confirmation that it is right to talk in terms of changing things, and that it is helpful to do so (the way Godin crafted his post certainly got me thinking in a constructive way).
  • Godin links the wrong words in his post! You should never say “click here.” The words you link need to be information carrying. That is both more helpful and more effective. So, Godin is great, but not perfect (I’m sure he also has reasons for breaking this rule — but he’s wrong!).

So, though I am not going to enroll in his course, the value of this email from Godin’s blog is far beyond the fact that it notified me about the course. It helped build my thinking, and gave me an opportunity to think about how I do things and how I craft ideas.

That is a huge impact, and an impact that cannot be measured by the response rate to the actual post. That shows how productivity is about much more than tangible outcomes; intangibles (affecting how people think) are just as important — and, in fact, something that actually will result in tangible outcomes and great effectiveness down the road.

And this process also shows how productivity methods, like getting your email to zero every day, are not about rigid structure and just getting things off your list. Rather, they provide a framework in which exploration can happen. If we think of productivity as just getting things checked off our lists faster, we will miss the most important and enriching moments of life.

 

What Does it Mean to be in Control of Your Day?

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Some helpful points on what it looks like to actually be in control of your time and your day, from Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management:

  1. You are able to complete your work every day. Even though your to-do list never ends, it is possible to know exactly what you need to do in order to get your work done each day.
  2. You know what a days’ work is and thus when you’ve finished it. “Before you can say that you have completed your work for the day, you need to know what it consists of” (49).
  3. If you can’t get through a days work in a day, you can diagnose the problem and fix it.
  4. You can complete all your routine daily actions very quickly.
  5. You can complete projects in the quickest possible time. “Knowing how to get projects started and how to keep them moving is a major skill” (51).
  6. You can identify exactly what the right workload is for you. When you take on (or are given) too much work, it doesn’t all get done, or done well. The problem is that what does and doesn’t get done tends to happen at random, rather than by deliberate choice. It is much better to make conscious decisions. This is easier when you know what constitutes the right workload.
  7. You can bring new work online without disrupting existing work. To do this, you need to have mastery of the previous point—knowing what the right workload is for you.
  8. You know how to deal with genuine emergencies, without being pulled off track by things that seem like emergencies but are not.
  9. You can get moving on all the things you dream of doing “someday.”
  10. You know how to follow up properly.
  11. You can keep track of the tasks you’ve delegated.
  12. You can deal with other people’s bad time management. “Even when we’ve solved the problem of our own poor time management, we still have the problem of other people’s poor time management to contend with” (53). When things are out of order for us, we tend to respond to the things that make the loudest noise. It’s the same with others. You can utilize this principle to get your stuff accomplished with them.
  13. You can motivate yourself to power through the days’ work.

Does Listening to Music While You Work Hurt Your Productivity?

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For the last few months, I’ve started listening to music more because I’m mostly working from my basement. Here are my informal conclusions on whether listening to music helps or hurts your productivity.

First, it depends on what kind of work you are doing. For some kinds of work, it doesn’t hinder your productivity at all and makes it more pleasant. Obviously.

Second (and this is the important point), I’ve found that for intensive work that requires focus and great concentration, listening to music keeps me from getting into the zone and thus causes my work to take a lot longer. Further, there are some breakthroughs that probably don’t happen because of the fact that you aren’t able to concentrate fully — thus decreasing the quality of your work.

This happens in spite of intentions, and you largely have no control over it. In other words, even if you have high energy and are ready to get into the zone, music will often prevent it from happening.

This applies only to music with words, and there are of course some exceptions. But in the main, I’ve found that if I need to get dialed in and concentrate, music with words is a big stumbling block.

That’s what I’ve found. What have you found?

How to Increase the Emotional Intelligence of Your Email Messages

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A good article on the emotional intelligence of email at the 99% by Scott McDowell. Here’s the first part:

Earlier this year I attended a presentation with Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence and godfather of the field of Emotional Intelligence. According to Goleman, there’s a negativity bias to email – at the neural level.

In other words, if an email’s content is neutral, we assume the tone is negative.  In face-to-face conversation, the subject matter and its emotional content is enhanced by tone of voice, facial expressions, and nonverbal cues.  Not so with digital communication.

Technology creates a vacuum that we humans fill with negative emotions by default, and digital emotions can escalate quickly (see: flame wars). The barrage of email can certainly fan the flames. In an effort to be productive and succinct, our communication may be perceived as clipped, sarcastic, or rude. Imagine the repercussions for creative collaboration.

He goes on to give six tips for making sure your email messages communicate the right tone.

Need Help Getting Up Early?

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Get a Clocky, the alarm clock that runs away from you:

Can’t wake up? You’re not alone. Stats show that 40% of people ‘abuse’ the snooze. Typical alarm clocks just don’t work well. Ours never lets you oversleep again. Clocky runs away and hides if you don’t get out of bed. When the alarm sounds, Clocky will wait for you to get up. But if you snooze, Clocky will jump off of your nightstand (from 3 feet), and run around your room, determined to get you up on time. Clocky’s hip, innovative and charming. What could be better to wake up next to?