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Email is a system that delivers other people’s priorities to your attention.
Chris Brogan (Gmail engineer)
Objective: To establish a fixed routine for checking email.
Email is a distraction that makes you feel like you’re getting real work done. When faced with a completely open and unstructured day, you may find your attention pulled in different directions. You might want to work on a postgraduate proposal, but you have marking to do. You should be preparing a lecture, but you have a meeting that you need to prepare for.
Having so many competing calls for attention is what makes email such a tempting proposition; it immediately gives you a list of tasks to work on. This is why so many of us start the day by opening email and getting distracted with other people’s priorities. When you don’t have a plan to prioritise your schedule, it will be prioritised for you. And checking email first thing in the day is the surest way to have your work prioritised by others.
Don’t open email as soon as you get to work
The ability to consistently focus on something difficult, over extended periods of time, is correlated with successful outcomes. You should therefore aim to start your day with a few hours to work on the high-value tasks that are most important to you (and your organisation). Don’t start your day by opening your email client. This idea is simple, but not easy in practice.
- Your attention is your most valuable resource. Paying attention to high-value tasks is one of the few things that can really drive your career forward; no-one got promoted because of their attentiveness to email.
- Starting your day by checking email may be the least productive thing you can do.
- By setting aside the first 2 hours for high-value tasks, you’re prioritising work that matters. Obviously, this work needs to align with your institutional priorities; your first two hours in the office shouldn’t be focused on writing your next novel.
- Turn off email notifications on your phone and computer. These notifications are designed to get your attention, which distracts you from what you should be doing. When you have a couple of email sessions scheduled (see the activity below), you know you’ll get to the messages soon enough.
- One reason that you may keep your email open all day is because you use your inbox as a to-do list. Stop using email as a to do list (more on this in Lesson 3, Processing email).
- When you stop using email as a to-do list, it makes sense to archive your messages when you’ve extracted the useful information from them. Using the search feature to find archived emails is probably more efficient than scrolling through your inbox anyway.
Caution
For better or worse, email has become the standard for organisational communication. So this is not a manifesto against email. However, it is a suggestion to pause before checking email, and to schedule your email sessions the way you would schedule your writing sessions.
Activity
I split my email sessions during the day according to how I plan to engage with it i.e. I have different goals for each email session. Use time-blocking (see the module on Scheduling) to add the suggestions below to your schedule, editing as necessary. It will take time to settle into a routine that suits you.
- Triage (before work, while the kettle is boiling, or on the bus, for about 5 minutes). Do it on your phone so you’re not tempted to write detailed responses. Use this time to delete, archive, snooze, and mark messages. The goal is to quickly identify the most important emails and to clear out those that don’t need your attention. If nothing else, it should ‘give you permission’ to spend the first couple of hours in the office on your high-value tasks, rather than on email.
- Urgent emails (10:30; 30-60 minutes). Work through the most urgent of the emails you marked earlier. This is when you can respond to colleagues who need information to move their projects forward. This is also the time to transform emails into lists of tasks in your daily notes, either for today or some day in the future. The goal for this session is to provide information that others are waiting for, and to convert emails into lists of tasks. When your time is up, and you’ve worked through the most important messages, close your inbox until the next session.
- Normal (13:00; 2 hours). This session includes the work that arises from your emails. Work through the messages you didn’t get to in the first session, ensuring that you archive emails as you convert them into tasks in your schedule. The goal for this session is to work through as many emails as possible. This includes not only responding to emails, but in doing the work arising from the emails. You should complete these in order of priority.
- Quick daily review (about 5 minutes before the end of your working day). Your end-of-day review should include a final email check, again on the phone, where you can delete, archive, snooze, and mark messages. I like to finish my work day with an empty inbox, knowing that anything that comes in after this point can wait until the morning. This will help you to psychologically check out of work mode for the day. Anyone sending you emails after 15:00 has little expectation that you respond on the same day. If something really is urgent, it should have been a phone call.
- Go home and don’t check email until tomorrow morning (on the phone).
Bonus points: Make sure that personal messages go to a personal email address. While it may seem convenient to have all email in a single inbox, this just adds to your incoming information stream, making it harder to stay focused on your high-value work. Related to this, you should unsubscribe from all but the most high-value mailing lists. Go back over the newsletters you’ve received in the past month and think about how often you actually read them. If you don’t read them because you never have time, unsubscribe. Except for the Head space newsletter; that’s a keeper.
Resources
- Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Grand Central Publishing.
- Newport, C. (2021). A World without email: Reimagining work in an age of communication overload. Portfolio.
Email management course
Build a more reasonable relationship with your email, where your daily tasks aren’t determined by the random order of messages in your inbox.