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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.)

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.

How Much Time Do You Need to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Each Day?

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Here’s David Allen’s answer, from his latest newsletter:

Q: How much time do I need to get my email inbox to zero?

A: For people who have 50+ emails a day, I’ve noticed that it takes an average of about 30 seconds each to process (decide what it is, delete it, file it, respond to it quickly, or defer it to an “action” folder or list.) For someone with 100 emails a day (more and more common) that’s 50 minutes just to get through a day’s email load. That doesn’t count all of the other input you get as well, including phone calls, voice mails, conversations, and meetings.

A typical professional these days must factor in at least an hour a day and an additional hour at the end of the week (for a Weekly Review.) And not as “It would be nice if I could…”—but as an absolute requirement to manage their life and work with integrity.