A better way to manage email
Background
On average I get between 300 to 400 emails a day.
Even though many don’t require any action and are FYI — I still need a good email strategy to deal with the 50 or so that require my attention.
My inbox is probably an outlier (because my team contributes to open source projects and because Product Managers are dot connectors). That said, I believe that the tactics below are generally applicable and can be a significant productivity booster in 2022.
Note: All info is GMail based — you can adapt to other inboxes but note the off-piste sign.
My email strategy
My goal is to spend less time in the gmail tab, improve email throughput, prioritise important replies and reduce failure rate (missing email replies, emails buried under a pile of spam, etc).
The tactics described below are my personalised Zero Inbox strategy.
1. Create a focused email view
I find the Default email view (Primary|Social|Promotions|…) hazy.
No matter how much time I spend scanning email, there is always the one that gets lost — I either do not see it in the first place or I forget the mental note and never get back to it.
The first step is to create a focused view so that you don’t lose sight of important emails.
Go to Settings → Inbox, set Inbox type to Multiple Inboxes and create the following labels (to-do, waiting, to-read). I like my Multiple inbox position to Right of the inbox but you can play around with things and see what works for you.
You can see the result below. You now have your email inbox and to the right the labels you just created.
2. Triage, archive and label email
The goal is to triage all incoming email as fast as possible, so that your inbox is empty and you spend more time on the emails that matter.
For each email, I spend less than 30 seconds deciding:
- Is this email something I don’t care about? → Action: Archive
- Is this email acknowledged and does not need a reply? → Action: Archive
- Is this email one that needs a short reply (< 30s rule)? → Action: Reply
- Is this email one that needs elaborate reply (>30s rule)? → Action: Move to To-do label
- Is this email one that needs a thorough read? → Action: Move to To-read label
- Is this email one that I expect a reply to? → Action: Move to Waiting label
Pro tips:
- Create email filters (I use a complex appscript setup that I might blog about in the future but the basic filters should be good enough)
- Learn the keyboard shortcuts (press ? in a gmail tab) — archive (e), move (v), label (l), move forward/backwards (j, k)
- Automatically advance to the next email by enabling Settings → Advanced → Auto-advance to Enable
- Triage email on a regular schedule — I only do it twice a day, as sort of a log on/log off routine.
If you never archived email before I suggest you triage only the top of your inbox stack. For the rest, declare email bankruptcy and bulk archive.
Note: “Archiving” is often misunderstood — it does not delete email; the email is stored out of sight but still available when you search for it.
3. Todo, Waiting, To read
The whole point is to decouple the email read/reply from the triage part. This way triaging can become a quick task, almost automatic and replying/in-depth reading get more time and focus.
I use the To-do label for emails that need a detailed reply, in-depth and urgent read and my daily/weekly/monthly todo list. These are the emails I spend more time on.
I use the Waiting label for emails that I expect a reply to. I usually add this label to emails I send/reply to and check-in if needed.
I use the To-read label for emails that tend to be low priority but interesting enough to be worth an in-depth read. These are the sort of emails that don’t fit into the < 30s rule and are not urgent enough to be dealt with quickly.
I encourage you to experiment with as many labels as you think would be helpful for your work/email mental model.
4. (optional) Aggressively snooze and automatically label
Sometimes my To-do gets out of control and I need to prioritise things further. Other times I need to be reminded of an email at a future time. For all of these I use snooze (b).
As you can see from my email view, I filter out emails that are snoozed from my multiple inbox labels (!in:snoozed). This is helpful as the email is likely to be in one of my working labels and I’d like to get it out of sight until it is due.
To pay more attention, when triaging or even when crafting a reply, I automatically label emails (using a filter) that include certain email aliases. These colourful labels quickly draw my attention.
5. (optional) Using your inbox as todo
Have you ever tried sending an email to your <email>+<random string>@… ?
I use my email as a todo list. Whenever I need to remember to do something (like this blog :-) ) I send myself an email. I want this to skip the inbox and be automatically put in my To-do label for which I use a suffix based filter.
For example when I subscribe to something that I don’t really care to hear from I use my <email>+spam@… email address.
6. (optional) Scheduled emails
This probably does not belong here but I’m not planning another email blogpost soon so…
I use GMail’s “scheduled send” whenever I fancy working over the weekend or a bit later than I should. I try to be mindful of the fact that many, like me, check email even over the weekend and I don’t want my low priority interrupts to mess up their flow.
Therefore most of these emails are scheduled to leave my inbox at a later time — Monday morning or when the receiver gets back from their OOO.
Conclusion
Managing email can really be more efficient.
Like all things new, doing email this way will probably feel less productive to start with and even a nuisance at times.
However, your investment will compound and soon you’ll be using your email time more efficiently. I can’t imagine going back to doing email the old way — and I bet that if you stick to it you’ll feel the same way too!
