About two years ago, I started an email diet. I was never close to email bankruptcy, but the constant flow of more than 100 messages a day was just too distracting and time consuming.
Lots of blog posts, even books, have been written about email productivity. I read quite a few of them and tried out different approaches. What follows aren’t my original ideas, but a combination of various tips and methods that work for me. Maybe they are helpful to you.
To begin with, let’s see how to reduce the volume of emails.
Unsubscribe all newsletters
Once I started to monitor my inbox-traffic, I was amazed how many newsletters I received. Emails from record labels, mailorders and other companies were flooding my inbox constantly.
I unsubscribed to almost all of those newsletters as soon as I got one. Within a few weeks, the quantity of emails in my inbox dropped by more than a half. For some newsletters that I wanted to keep, I’ve set up a gmail account, which I visit once a week or so, when I’m in the mood for distraction.
I would also recommend to disable all unnecessary notifications from facebook, twitter or other websites. Those services already have a huge potential to disrupt and distract you all day long, so try at least to keep your inbox clean of those.
Use good spam filters
This one is pretty obvious: get a good spam filter. If you’re on a Mac, I highly recommend Spam Sieve. Once trained, it’s incredible accurate and filters more than 95% of all spam mails. $30 well spent.
Write less. Be precise.
Every email you write potentially triggers a reply. If you want to receive less emails, send less emails. It’s that easy.
This is even more important, if you work with people in the music industry. Send one email to a record label person and you receive 10 more mails. I’m not kidding, I’m not even exaggerating. In this business, people seem to love the CC and “reply all”-functions. Every email includes at least 5 other people (bosses, colleagues, band members) and almost all of them will reply to anything. In 2007, one project we were working on generated 1764 (one thousand seven hundred sixty-four!) emails. Last year, a similar project with the same people resulted in 869 messages. Still crazy, but 50% less. I’m sure that this significant decrease also had to do with my email behavior. Unlike two years earlier, I didn’t reply immediately, but waited a few hours with my response. I then summarized topics and questions, and included less people in the recipient list. But maybe even more important than all that: I was more precise. I didn’t just sent less emails, but I made their content shorter and more to the point. If possible, I tried to ask questions that could be answered with a short sentence, maybe even just a a yes or no.
Now that less emails are arriving in your inbox, here are a few tips how to deal with them:
Inbox Zero
You might have heard about this approach, it’s pretty popular. Merlin Mann of 43folders.com is an avid advocate of this method, so I recommend to check out his articles if this sounds like something you might want to try.
To start with Inbox Zero, make a new folder in your email client and move the content of your inbox to that folder. Yes, all 859 emails. Select all and drag them to your new folder. Now look at the blank space that is your inbox and breathe deeply. Do you feel it?
Not having to look at a crowded inbox all the time was a big relief for me. No more “open loops” as David Allen (whose GTD-system is actually the inspiration for Inbox Zero) would say. Try it for yourself.
Moving your emails to a temporary folder was the easy part. Keeping your inbox clean, however, is a bit more difficult at first. You need to form a habit: Every time you check your emails and new messages pop up, decide right away what to do with them. A lot of emails can be deleted right after you read them. Or, if you want to keep them, because you might need that information later on, move them to your archive. If it only takes less than 2 minutes to reply, do so. If someone else should take care of it, delegate it. Most emails can quickly be processed like that within a few minutes.
However, if an incoming email demands a more elaborate response, or if you need to gather some information before answering, don’t let it sit in your inbox. Instead move it to a dedicated folder (see below for more).
These are the basics. For more tips, visit inboxzero.com
Easy filing system
For a while, the inbox zero strategy worked well for me. But then I left a few emails in my inbox. It was still pretty empty with those handful message. Even when there was a dozen, it still looked nice and clean. Not so much a few days later, when I already had to use the scroll wheel to see all the messages in my inbox… Don’t let that happen to you. If you go for inbox zero, try to aim for 0. Not 5. Not 10. Once you get sloppy with the processing part, the floodgates are open.
Part of what kept me from cleaning my inbox on every session was my way of archiving. There was a folder for emails related to our design studio, another one for our record label, a folder for all private messages. These folders had subfolders for project A, task B, person C… All in all I used up to 30 folders.
It took me quite some time to realized that this is totally useless. Filing thousands of emails takes way more time and mental energy than occasionally searching for a specific message. The search function is so good and fast, you don’t need to tuck away your emails in nice, little boxes. Make filing as easy as possible, it shouldn’t be an obstacle to keep your inbox clean. Just throw everything on a big pile. But don’t let that pile sit in your inbox, keep it somewhere behind doors.
Right now, I have only 5 folders in my mail app. One is called “archive”, that’s the huge pile of all emails that I keep for reference. Another folder is called “respond”, were I store all emails that I need or want to answer at a later point of time. In “action” I temporary collect all emails that require some action on my part (e.g. sending out a CD that someone ordered). Then there is “print”, were I collect all receipts that need to be printed for tax and accounting issues. I do that once every three month, when our accountant visits us. The fourth folder is were Spam Sieve puts emails that are detected as spam. I review that folder about once a week to check if Spam Sieve was wrong (which happens very rarely). In addition I use smart folders, which aren’t really folders but saved search queries.
Using templates
Especially when we were more active with our music label, I got a lot of questions about how to pay for a record, where to send demos etc. I realized I was writing the same emails over and over again. After typing our bank account or address for the hundredth time, I saved a .txt-file with these text modules. That worked alright, but was a bit cumbersome. So I did a little research and found out about Mail Template, an add-on for Apple Mail that lets you answer with pre-written messages. Gmail has a similar feature, called “Canned Responses” (Settings > Labs).
Last, not least: Turn off auto-check
I don’t know about you, but I can’t ignore an incoming email. Once the mail icon starts to bounce, I have to look at it. That’s why I turned out auto-check. It’s too distracting.
Now I check emails manually, because I don’t want any emails to disrupt my flow. Ideally, I would like to do that only 3 – 4 times a day. But I’m prone to procrastination, so sometimes I switch to my email program, hit the “check”-button and hope that something arrives to keep me from doing more important work. Shutting down the program after processing all incoming emails helps a bit.
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Please remember that there is nothing like a one-size-fits-all solution for email management. Requirements, situations and preferences vary from person to person. These are some methods that work for me. They might not work for you. But I recommend to try these (and other) techniques to find out what suits you best.









