Email Management
It’s time to solve the biggest problem most people have with their organization and time management: Email
We receive an average of 333 emails per day.
We check email on average 11 times per hour.
84% of people keep email open in the background while working.
64% of people use notifications to learn about new emails.
70% of all received emails are opened within the first six seconds after receipt.
Email was created to be a productivity tool, but it’s turned into a huge time suck for most people. Research says the average American office worker spends 28% of their workday just managing their email. That’s a disaster, and it’s simply because they don’t know how to manage email. Here are the problems:
We allow ourselves to get way too many emails so we’re overwhelmed.
We check email way too frequently. 11 times an hour is every 5-6 minutes and is about 90 times during the workday!
Letting your computer or phone alert you to new emails is the worst thing you can possibly do. And most people do it. With every alert, you’re distracted and tempted to check your email.
Instantly opening all new emails is destroying your productivity.
Leaving your Inbox full of emails causes you stress, wastes your time as you keep re-reading them, and leaves you feeling overwhelmed.
I will teach you exactly what to do so that you can effortlessly get to an empty email inbox, stay focused on your work, and spend far less time managing your email. We start with an acronym called RAFT. That stands for the only 4 things you can do with an email: Refer, Action, File, and Trash.
Refer means this email isn’t for me: it should go to someone else. I hit forward, put in the person’s name, send, and delete the email. Now it’s out of my inbox.
Action means this email has some action I have to take. Here’s where you apply the 2 Minute Rule we talked about in an earlier lesson: As soon as you identify what action you need to take, if taking the action (such as replying to the email) will take you less than 2 minutes, just do it right away. If it will take you longer than 2 minutes, you write that action down in the “New, Unplanned Actions” section of your Happiful Planner and put the letter A next to it. The A tells you that there’s an email associated with this action.
Then you move the email into your Action email folder, which you’ll need to create. Put a dash or space in front of Action when you create the folder, and then that folder will always be at the top, where it is easy for you to file your Action emails. Now you’ve captured the action, and gotten the email out of your inbox. (Take a moment now to go into your settings and create your “- Action” folder.)
File means you’ve read the email, and you need to keep it for some reason. You’ll want to have appropriate subject folders to file all these “File” emails. If you don’t have the right subject folder yet, you can create it on the fly. Now that email’s out of your inbox.
Trash means that you’ve read it, there’s no action, and you don’t need to keep it. So just delete it.
I guarantee you that every email currently in your inbox, and every email you will ever receive, falls into one of those 4 categories. For each email, just mentally say “Refer, Action, File, Trash” and then you’ll know what to do with it.
This simple system is the core of the email solution but there’s more needed to solve the email problem. Here’s the rest of what you need to know to tame your email:
First of all, it‘s absolutely critical to turn off your email and all other notifications from your phone, tablet, and computer. It’s best to exit out of email entirely until it’s time to check and to keep your phone upside down when you’re not using it to make a phone call. You’ll be amazed at how much you can get done when you’re not distracted by email.
Next, use “Batch processing”. This means you read them all at once. As we’ve talked about, “switching costs” are a productivity drain that occurs every time you switch from one task to another. That means that the fewer times you stop what you’re doing to check and manage email, the less time you waste. So check email as infrequently as your job allows.
Each time you batch process, RAFT all of the emails you received since the last time you batch processed. As a reminder, to RAFT, for every email, just say to yourself Refer, Action, File, Trash and you’ll know what to do with that email.
You should only be seeing each email once and then it should be out of your inbox. By the way, if it’s a newsletter or something else that you need to read that will take longer than 2 minutes to read, that’s actually an Action, so like any Action, you write it down on your Happiful Planner in the “New, Unplanned Actions” section and file the email in your Action folder. Remember, you want to be proactive, not reactive. If you spend several minutes reading something just because someone sent it to you, you’re being reactive.
If you have not yet implemented your Daily Planning process including the Happiful Planner, please go reread those lessons. While the Email Management above will greatly help you by itself, to be most effective it should be implemented along with Daily Planning, the Happiful Planner, Remember the Milk, and the rest of the Happiful system.
Here are a few other tips that help:
Create a “- Pending” email folder. While your “- Action” folder is for all the emails that include an action you need to take, the “- Pending” folder is the opposite – it’s for all the emails you send where you are asking someone to take an action, and you are waiting for their completion. Any time you send an email asking someone to do something, cc yourself, and then move that new email into your Pending folder. At least once a week, go through your Pending folder: delete emails where you got what you needed, and follow up on any that you did not.
Here’s an important one-time setting for your Gmail: You want to turn off “Conversation View”. This is quite possibly the worst idea Google ever had. You end up not seeing all sorts of emails you need, or else you have to open it up to see them all anyway, wasting time for no reason.
Likewise, I suggest you go into the Settings/Labels tab and Hide all of the various Categories Google offers: Social, Updates, Forums, Promotions – they’re not very good at knowing what to put where and you’ll be way better off with Sanebox or Unroll.me for that purpose.
Review and clear your Spam folder at the same time as you RAFT, or at least once a day. Google is really good about identifying Spam, but not perfect. You’ll find real emails, sometimes important ones, in your Spam folder. And it’s really fast to clear them out. You just click the Spam folder, then hit the “Select all” box on top, and scan down the emails looking mainly at the sender but you can also look at the subjects. It’s amazing how fast you can recognize a real email in amongst the spam. If you find one, uncheck that one box, then with one click, delete the rest. It’s way better to spend the 10 seconds to clear your Spam folder than to miss an important email that got there by mistake.
If you get a lot of emails each day, there are two services that can help reduce the flow so you only deal with the real emails. Sanebox is email software that analyzes everything you send or receive, and automatically moves some bulk emails to trash and others like newsletters and ads, to a bulk email folder so you can stay focused on the real emails in your inbox and deal with the bulk emails during downtime. It costs $59/year. Unroll.me is similar but free. With it, you manually train it by identifying which senders you want in your inbox, in your bulk email folder, or straight to trash.
If you don’t want or need to use Sanebox or Unroll.me, you should get in the habit of unsubscribing from everything possible. Gmail now has an Unsubscribe button right at the top of most bulk emails to make it easier; if not you should find it at the bottom of every bulk email.
Finally, you may think you can’t do this because you have thousands of emails in your inbox already. There is a quick solution to that.
Start RAFTing new emails.
After a week of RAFTing, move all of your old emails out of your inbox. Hit the checkbox in the upper left corner to “select all”, and then above the list of emails, you’ll see “Select all X,000 messages in Inbox?” Select that, and then you move them all into a new folder you’ll call “Old Emails”.
To recap the rules of Email Management:
Turn email Notifications off
Batch Process your emails to an empty inbox using RAFT, as infrequently as your job allows
Exit out of email when you’re done RAFTing
Create a “- Action” folder and a “- Pending” folder and use them
Turn off Conversation View and Hide all of the folders in Gmail’s Categories
Use Sanebox or Unroll.me, or rigorously unsubscribe from all possible emails
Give yourself a clean start by moving all existing emails to a new “Old Emails” folder
Once you implement the Happiful Email Management System, your stress levels will drop and your productivity will soar.