Email Management Practices

It's easy to look at email as something that you have to keep up with, so you can get back to work, but so much actual work gets done in email (and so much potential working time is taken away by email wrangling).

If you think about emails in your inbox as tennis balls on your side of the court, it's important not to let them pile up on your side, and it's also important to hit them back in the right order (by value and important, not just attacking the newest or the oldest emails)

Cal Newport's A World Without Email is a great read that talks about so many great principles -- I think the most powerful concepts are:

• Hyperactive Hive Mind - the behavior where someone starts an email thread with several people to figure something out, that could be a short meeting if it was planned out well, but instead turns into an email thread with a bunch of people that just won't die, sucking up so many people's time and attention
• The power of systems to reduce email volume - you don't need to send so many emails if you've established a "system" (not a technology system necessary, but a process/flow that you and others agree on, such as how the quarterly strategy slides as assembled, reviewed, and finalized every 3 months)

Some practices to keep in mind:

• Design and run a "system" for how to manage your emails, thinking about things like how quickly you review new emails (intake/triage), how you track unresolved emails, etc.
• Keep emails unread until you have resolved them (e.g. responded with an answer and/or completed the requested/needed action), or another approach to track them tightly
• Consider how you use your email tools and how you want them to work -- for example, if you use Microsoft Outlook, and quickly skim emails in the preview pane, consider configuring Outlook not to mark an email as "Read" when you click on an email to review it in message preview, to avoid accidentally using it (In Outlook, go to File > Options > Mail on left nav-bar > Reading Pane and tune these settings)
• Consider creating "Search Folders" (Outlook dynamic 'folders' that don't store emails, but let you build queries to quickly see different 'views' of your email) or configuring your Google Workspace Inbox Type to align best with how you work
  • In Outlook, I like to have an "Unread or Follow Up" search folder that shows all unread messages and all flagged emails (including ones that may have accidentally marked as read)
  • In Google Workspace, I like showing my "Important and Unread" emails in the top section, then "Other Unread" emails, and finally "Everything Else", to prioritize on senders I've taught Google are important
• Learn keyboard shortcuts for applications you use often, like Outlook or Gmail for Google Workspace -- quickly marking emails as read/unread and moving to the next email are huge time-savers
• For critical emails, mark emails with flags or stars, in addition to keeping it unread to reduce the risk of losing them
• Consider creating categories or labels so you can triage emails as they come in and set them with categories based on priority, so you're investing time in knocking out the most important emails, not just the oldest or newest emails
• Learn the cultural norms of response speed -- while it's not healthy to check your email every 5 minutes, as you'll get no deep work done, it's also often not acceptable to take weeks to respond to an email