Yesterday, as I escaped the maze of my inbox, I came the the realization that I have used email improperly for so long. I’ve been using email as a to-do list and frankly, it doesn’t work that way in the real world. Email also isn’t a shopping cart, nor is it a platform to automate marketing or establish a sales pipeline. I’ll get into the ways that I will reduce the time-suck that is email and make it productive once again and help you with advice on how to be productive.
E-mail, the very essence of online communication, has grown on me. I love helping people and emailing them quick answers. But, are there hidden dangers in being a slave to your inbox? I think there is.
Ever since I used to receive requests to do things via e-mail professionally, I simply marked the email as unread because I know I would eventually get back to it and close up my inbox with the unread email count at an accomplished, “0.” But this has caused problems in how I reach that number on a daily basis.
Here are three fallacies of using e-mail as a to-do list:
- No deadline. Even if someone wants it next week, month or in the next 20 minutes, there isn’t a trackable deadline to attribute to it. I’m not much of a deadlines kind of guy (seriously, ask Dave about it), but I’m goal-oriented. Goals without deadlines are merely dreams.
- If I see it, I’ll do it. Yeah, sure that’s good for the next few hours until another batch of email comes flooding in. This has caused me to frequently recall previous emails, scroll through and even confirm if I sent something. When you gotta find an email, it wastes valuable time.
- Email Turned Enemy. Email is not the enemy, lack of email is not a friend either. Email is simply the feedback and communications to what the heck is going on around you. Not every email results in a task, a response or even to be read. That’s a fact. Don’t make it the enemy.
That said, I’ve now implemented a couple strategies to make email easier to handle and process. Not all email clients are created equal, so you might need to Google around to see what works best. For my examples, I use Mozilla Thunderbird, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Tagging or Labeling email is a great way to quickly categorize the type of message and what to do with it. Yes, it’s mostly manual work, but it only takes a couple seconds per message and will help you manage what things need action, and what things don’t. I’ve segmented emails that I read into these categories:
- Urgent
- Important
- No Action
- Personal
- Reference
Notice how I used colors. As a visual person, I can quickly internalize an email without scanning for words, but merely using colors to determine the level of importance. Not all tags/labels are exclusive from each other, so I could easily tag something as Important and Personal as much as I could tag Reference and Urgent. Often if I read a subject line and the first and last sentence in an email, I know what I gotta do. No need to read the fluff in between.
This adopts from a few principles by Stephen Covey preaches on time management — specifically, mastering the distinction between urgency and importance so you can stay pleasantly in Quadrant 2. To see a full explanation on his time grid, this blog post has it all.
Alright, so in Thunderbird, here’s how to implement tagging for productivity in Thunderbird:
- Open Mozilla Thunderbird.
- Click Tools >> Options.
- Click the Display tab.
- Select the Tags sub-tab. You can edit and and remove tags.
- When reading an email, press your numbers on your keyboard to have it tag emails accordingly (1-5 if you have five tags, for example.)
- Now, to make it easy to see what the colors mean at a glance, just show the Tags column.
- And in the end, you have a fairly organized inbox. From here, you could setup filters on different people, subject lines or other criteria to be able to tag emails appropriately so you can quickly act (or not) on an email message.
In the end, it’s not about being a victim to the volume of e-mail. Make it work for you. In doing this, you’ll quickly learn the importance of email and hopefully share the same respect that you have with your recipients and make sure every email is actionable for them to read.
I also wanted to add that some people who do business from their inbox are missing out. They miss out on the freedom to be able to focus on their business and not be a slave to their inbox. How can you pull up a customer history? If your answer is to search your inbox, you’ve lost all sense of scalability. With Infusionsoft, you can automate the 80%+ contact with your customers in a friendly and welcome way, while leaving you free to personally follow-up with customers via email to your liking.
What are the ways you’re making email work for you? (Tips, techniques and anything else is welcome!)
[Image by Lars Plougmann on Flickr]
