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How to Write Better Emails

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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.

A Simple Way to Organize Anything

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One of the most helpful books I’ve read on organizing is actually Organizing for Dummies. It was comprehensive — it covers just about all areas — while also being very clear.

I don’t agree with everything in it (I differ from the approach she takes to filing in some ways, especially the categories). But there was one huge take-away from the book that applies to just about everything you have to organize.

This huge take-away is the acronym she uses for her organizing process. The acronym is P-L-A-C-E:

  1. P urge
  2. L ike with like
  3. A access
  4. C ontain
  5. E valuate

This process is really, really useful. And it doesn’t just apply to organizing space, like your garage. I implement a variation of it even when organizing ideas, websites, files, and so forth.

First, purge. Get rid of what is unnecessary. You don’t want to organize things you don’t need.

Second, “like with like” means to group like things to together. This is the principle of good writing we learned in high school English, and it applies to all forms of organizing. This is the central organizing principle of anything.

Third, access means that you put things you use more frequently to be closer to access than things you use less. For example, if you are organizing your kitchen, you probably have lots of hard-to-access spots. You put the pans you hardly use in those places, not the pots you use every day. Or at your desk: things you use every day should be at your fingertips, like an effective cockpit.

Fourth, contain. Don’t leave things scattered about, even when they are grouped. Contain them into contains. Drawer dividers in a drawer, plastic tubs in your basement storage, and so forth. And again, this is a broadly applicable principle. Web pages, for example, apply this principle. The various elements of a page are grouped, and then visual characteristics “contain” the various elements to help guide your eye and make the page easy to process.

Fifth, evaluate. When you are done organizing, step back, consider what you’ve done, and see if everything feels right. Change what can be improved.

How to Organize Your Internet Bookmarks for Immediate Access

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I posted the other day on how to organize your RSS feeds. The other part of the picture is organizing your internet favorites.

By having both of these organized well, you can save a lot of time and make your online workflow more enjoyable.

Is it Really Worth it to Organize Your Bookmarks?

As with my RSS feeds, I did an experiment about a year ago by not organizing them. I just left them in a long list (at that time in Internet Explorer), testing to see whether that would provide quicker and more direct access.

What I found was that I had to spend a lot of time hunting through that list for the bookmark I wanted.

So I’ve concluded that it is indeed more effective to organize your bookmarks. However, you need to do it right. This is a basic principle in regard to all filing: if you don’t create the categories right, you won’t want to use them.

But if you do create the categories right, you’ll not only find that things are easier, but will probably find that it creates additional insight and creativity. (Strange, but true: It makes you ask: what’s missing?)

Here are three other benefits of organizing your bookmarks:

1. It Makes it Easy to Access Dozens of Sites Very Quickly

For example, if I need to pay my credit card bill, I go to my “financial” category and click on my credit card site. Then I might want to check the latest news, so I just click into “news” and then one of my news sites (yes, even with RSS I still sometimes visit the actual sites). Then I can quickly go over to my “workflow” category and bring up the dashboard for my blog to write a post, then to my “travel” category to hit Expedia and book a trip I have to take, and so forth. It’s all very quick and easy.

2. It’s Fun

I actually find it kind of fun to have all of the bookmarks of my most-used sites right at my fingertips. It’s enjoyable to be able to have them all at immediate access and to quickly jump over from one category of site to another, as needed.

3. It Helps You Remember New Sites You Want to Stay on Top Of

I realize that subscribing to the RSS feed usually is the best way to do this. But there are still some sites that work best by actually visiting them. By having my bookmarks organized, it keeps it on my mind that there are various types of sites that I want to keep visiting, and it does this without cluttering my interface.

For example, I came across the site Innocentive last spring. It is an idea marketplace where “organizations with challenging problems” can connect with “smart people with creative solutions.” It provides a supplement to the traditional R&D approach by utilizing the extend “smart world” to help solve business problems.

Great idea. So I want to keep up with how the site and works and come to understand it a little better. I don’t just want to go look at it once and then forget about it. Having it in one of my bookmark categories ensures that once in a while I’ll remember to go back to the site and take a further look.

What Categories to Have

I mentioned above that a lot of the usefulness of this comes down to using the correct principles of classification in creating your categories. I’ll be doing future posts on setting up files well, so I won’t go into that here. For now, here are the categories that I group my bookmarks into:

  • Workflow
  • DG [where I work]
  • NewCo [a side venture I’m not doing anymore]
  • Friends
  • Social Networking
  • News
  • Politics
  • Stores
  • Financial
  • Travel
  • Business
  • Social Good
  • Technology
  • Productivity
  • Blogging
  • Theology
  • General
  • Projects

Here are a few notes on the categories:

“Workflow” is where I put the online tools that exist for accomplishing the primary tasks of work and life. For example, it contains my links to: Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Analytics, my blog, the admin panel for my blog, and a few other things.

“DG” is where I put online documents or websites (Basecamp projects, etc.) pertaining to my job. Now, one might ask why “Google Docs,” for example, is not in “DG,” since I mostly use that for work. The reason is that the stuff in “workflow” is mostly platforms that can be used for work or life. Stuff in my work folder (DG) is stuff that is specific to my work.

The “Projects” category is at the end is for temporary bookmarks that are relevant to a project I’m working on. It’s a good working place to put stuff that I need to access a lot for a project, but which I then can get rid of. Sometimes that stuff might just go well in my work folder; it really depends on how I want to use it and how much I need a certain project’s stuff kept all to itself for ease of use.

The rest of the categories are probably pretty self-explanatory. But there are principles behind these groupings, which will be discussed in future posts on filing in general.

To create the categories, in Firefox go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks. Then create them by creating them as folders within the “Bookmarks Toolbar” folder. In Internet Explorer, go to Favorites > Organize Favorites and you can create the folders there. Once you’ve done this, move your bookmarks into the categories.

(I assume you will probably be creating some new categories as well, and not using some of the ones that I have. But hopefully the ones I’ve listed give you a good idea of how to do the categories.)

Where to Put the Categories

The key to making this work comes down to where you put the categories. You don’t want to have to open up that left sidebar to reveal your favorites.

Instead, you want these folders to be manifest in the bookmarks toolbar, which shows across the top of the page. I use Firefox, but you can do this in IE as well, and I think in Safari too (at least I hope you can if you are a Safari user). Here’s what I mean (I’m really sorry if the image is low quality; I think you can still get the idea):

The bookmarks toolbar is that line across the bottom with the labels “workflow,” “DG,” “family,” etc. When you click on one of those labels, the bookmarks in that folder reveal in a drop-down from there. It’s really handy.

To make the bookmarks toolbar display, in Firefox go to View > Toolbars and highlight “bookmark toolbar.” Now, all the category folders that you created will show up in the bookmarks toolbar across the top of the page.

In Internet Explorer, go to to View > Toolbars and select “links.” Then, make sure to also deselect the “lock toolbars option.” Now, you’ll see the word “links” show up somewhere up top in IE. Take that and drag it where you want it to go. When I look at my IE, it looks like it puts this on the same line as the menu toolbar. Make sure to drag it on to its own line and extend it across. Now make your favorites show on the left side (click the “star” that makes them show) and drag the folders up onto the links bar. Then you can close the favorites side bar and not have to use it.

Alternatively, if you’d rather just use the favorites sidebar in IE instead of the links toolbar, that might work out just as well. In Firefox I found this cumbersome because it treats the side bar a bit differently.

This Connects to Filing in General

So now we see a way to organize online book marks in good categories and how to make those categories quick and easy to access.

As I’ve mentioned above, this is part of the larger question of filing in general. I’ll be doing posts in the future on how to set up your files. (Yes, even in the age of good desktop search, there is still a critical place for good electronic filing, as well as effective filing of paper-based stuff. Good filing is fun and effective!)

How I'm Processing the Questions on Email for Next Week

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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.

How to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day

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[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…]

Send Me Your Questions on Email

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

How to Organize Your RSS Feeds

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Typically, I am all about grouping and organizing things. But about a year ago I decided to test whether, when it came to my RSS feeds, it might actually save time not to organize them into folders.

My reasoning was that simply having them kept in a straight list would make them directly visible and accessible.

And there is something to that. I found it most useful back when I used Internet Explorer as my reader (I actually found it very handy to use IE for my RSS reader).

When I switched to a Mac, I didn’t find Firefox’s Live Bookmarks very convenient, so I switched to NetNewsWire–which I really love. It also has a very good interface for easily allowing you to organize your feeds into folders if you want.

I concluded that it makes things simpler and saves times to organize my feeds into folders, for two reasons:

  1. It allows me to more easily read my feeds by topic
  2. It makes the number of feeds less overwhelming

I find that it is more efficient, at least for me, to review my feeds by topic because I can go faster when I can roughly keep my mind on the same subject and proceed in chunks.

And when I didn’t use folders to group my feeds, I came to have a mental resistence to them because the list was so long.

Grouping them in folders also makes it easier to prioritize. Basically, my first folder is called “Priority.” This folder contains the feeds from any topic that are most important to me. So I can easily skip all the other folders if I am short on time, and focus in on these.

Then, if I have a bit more time it is easy to determine which topic is of greatest interest to me at the time, and I can just scan those folders quickly.

Compared to my experience of keeping my feeds in a straight list, I’ve fond that I save time by organizing them into folders.

Here is the list of categories I use:

  • Priority
  • Friends
  • News
  • Politics
  • Business
  • Career
  • Social Good
  • Productivity
  • Blogging
  • Publishing
  • Technology
  • Theology

How to Get the Mail

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Here’s one of the most basic productivity functions of all, and yet probably most of us never think about how we do it: Getting the mail.

I actually have to go get the mail right now. Why don’t I go do that, and then I’ll come back and summarize how I go through it.

Processing the Mail is the Same as Processing Your In-Box

OK, here we go. First, I’d normally actually just put it in my in-box, since it’s the middle of the afternoon, and process it the next time I process my in-box. And that’s the first point: The mail is just another form of input to be processed along with every other form of input you get. So in one sense I could stop this post right now, because getting the mail really reduces to processing your in-box. But, I will continue.

The Three Rules of Processing Stuff

Second, I go through the items one by one (very quickly). Looks like I have about 15 items. David Allen gives the three cardinal rules of processing, which apply here:

  1. Process the top item first
  2. Process one item at a time
  3. Never put anything back into in

The Two Questions when Processing Anything

Third, with each item I ask myself two questions: What is this? and What’s the next action? This is because before you can know what to do with something, you need to know what it is. Once you know what it is, you can determine how to handle it (that is, define the next action).

When No Action is Required

With most stuff, this is easy and takes about 0.25 seconds. Some things have no actions required. For example, an item of junk mail gets trashed.

Handling Quick Actions: The Two Minute Rule

Some things involve very quick actions. With these I apply David Allen’s “two minute rule”: if you can do it in two minutes or less, do it right away. So a newsletter or such from an organization I give to gets a quick look, for example, and then I toss it (or determine the larger action required by it and process it accordingly).

Handling Longer than Two Minute Actions

Then there are some things that involve more than 2 minutes of action. I have something in this category before me right now: the statement for my money market account. I have actually noticed that 90% of my 2-minute plus actions that come up fall into 1 of 6 categories. I’ve set up a group of pending files for these: bills to pay, notes to process, receipts to enter, other financial to enter, to read, and to file. This one falls into the “other financial to enter” category—I need to reconcile this with my Quicken–, so I put it in that file. (I go through those files every Saturday, by the way—I wouldn’t put anything in an action file without a regularly scheduled task to actual dispense of those actions. I put these regularly scheduled actions on my “action calendar,” which I’ll talk about down the road)

Now I have before me two post cards that the grandparents sent to our kids (ages 5 and 3) while they were on their trip to DC. I put these to my right in a temporary “out” pile, which is where I put stuff that I need to give to my wife or kids or take somewhere else in the house.

The next item is my 2009 vehicle tabs. Here I have two things to do: The stickers themselves go in my “out” box, and I will put them on my car when I take that stuff to where it goes. But I also want to keep the registration card that came with them, so I put that in my “to file” pile.

The next item is something from Dish Network saying I have to upgrade my DVR with these new smart cards they’ve sent, or it will stop working in two weeks. Good grief. This is why life is so complicated and we need productivity systems in the first place.

Now I have my IRA statement. There is a newsletter with an article on “what you need to know about bear markets,” which I’ll give 10 seconds to. There is also an update to the “custodial agreement” (whatever that is). In previous years I probably would have filed that with my IRA stuff, but I’m getting tired of the information glut, so I’m just going to throw that away. I put the actual statement into my “other financial to enter” file.

Now I have my mortgage statement. We’re not on automatic withdrawal because we plan on moving soon and I wanted to save the time of setting that up. Not sure if that actually saved me time, but oh well. I put the bottom portion in my “bills to pay” file and the actual statement in my “to file” pile.

There are a few magazines that I put in my “to read file,” and now I’m done. Now what I’m going to do is quickly take my “out” stuff where it goes (put the post cards for our kids in my wife’s in box, the tabs on the car, and that smart card in my DVR), file my “to file” stuff, and get on with my day. On Saturday morning I’ll clear out the two minute plus actions that I put into my “other financial to enter” and “bills to pay” files.

Nothing this time involved a project (a more-than-two-action outcome) or had to go on my next action list. Down the road I’ll be posting some about those lists and how to use them effectively.

What This Blog is About, Part 2

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There are a lot of blogs on productivity. So why start another one?

This comes down to the question of the angle this blog will take. There are a lot of great productivity blogs out there. Lifehacker hits productivity from the technological angle, Merlin Mann at 43 Folders writes about how to find the time and attention to do your best creative work, and Timothy Ferris writes about experiments in lifestyle design. So what’s my angle?

The most basic answer is that I am looking at productivity through the lens of decision-making. Being productive and effective is about making good decisions. Your calendar and projects list, if you have them, are ultimately decision-making tools.

The angle of this blog is also unique in the way it will try to tie together some divergent themes that nonetheless need to go together. Here are the things I want to tie together in this blog:

  1. Personal productivity and organizational productivity.
  2. The runway and the 50,000 foot level.
  3. Sound thinking and helpful action.
  4. The past and the future.

Tying Together Personal Productivity and Organizational Productivity

This is what I talked about in part 1 of this article and in my post “Broadening the Concept of Productivity.” In sum, I think productivity is not just about making ourselves more effective, but about knowing what will make our organizations and communities and society more effective. So I’m going to talk about not only how we can be more productive as individuals, but also how our organizations and communities can be more effective as well.

Tying Together the Runway and the 50,000 Foot Level

Here’s my productivity journey in a nutshell: David Allen’s Getting Things Done opens up a whole new world. Yet there are a few “snags” that I think the system has (which can be overcome). One of the snags is that GTD is great at the runway and 10,000 foot level (projects), but is less developed at the 20,000 foot and above level (roles, goals, and mission).

Stephen Covey’s books The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First, on the other hand, are superb at the 20,000 foot and above level. Yet they are weak in laying out a workable system for translating those plans into action at the project and next action levels.

What is needed is a productivity approach that synthesizes the best of Allen and Covey. I think I’ve done this for my own productivity system that I’ve built for managing my own life, and will be blogging a lot on how these two perspectives fit together. The result is a system of thinking that successfully ties the big picture (20,000 foot and above) to the every day (the runway of next actions and 10,000 foot level of projects).

Tying Together Sound Thinking and Helpful Action

In one sense it’s a bit odd that I’ve named this blog What’s Best Next, because that sounds almost like all I care about is what we do, when in reality I am a firmly believer of the primacy of thought. Not as a replacement for action, but as the director and leader of what we actually do. I think we make the best decisions on what to do when we understand the guiding principles of an area.

This is in now way, in no way, to say that thought alone is sufficient. It is to say that the most effective actions stem ultimately from the way we think, and if you approach anything piecemeal, you are unlikely to get good results. I love this quote from Roger Martin’s book The Opposable Mind: “Instead of attempting to learn from observing the actions of leaders, I prefer to swim upstream to the antecedent of doing: thinking. My critical question is not what various leaders did, but how their cognitive processes produced their actions” (The Opposable Mind, p. 19). Great thinking is the seedbed of great actions. This blog is about what’s best next, not just what’s next.

Tying Together the Past and the Future

And of course this blog is not only about what’s best next, but also what’s best next. We are looking ahead—both far off to what are the most productive actions for the long-term, as well as how to make the best decision about what to literally do next.

I love how Jim Collins relates that when he would ask Peter Drucker what the favorite book he wrote was, Drucker would always say “the next one.” That’s how I think: the best things are always to come. And knowing what’s best next requires knowing what came before. We have a ton to learn from the past. I want to think of what’s best, next, in the context of the whole.

Broadening the Concept of Productivity

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A lot of the advice I read on starting a blog said to narrow your topic as much as possible. That is good advice. But in one sense I’ve chosen to do the reverse.

I think we need to broaden the concept of productivity. Instead of thinking mainly in terms of making ourselves productive, we also need to think in terms of making our organizations and society more effective. This is really one of the ultimate goals, and most exciting things. The goal of personal productivity does not terminate on yourself, but is a means to being a useful person who makes the world a better place.

Hence, I define productivity as not only making yourself more effective, but making others more effective—our organizations, our communities, and our society.