Email overload: How to get your inbox to zero & boost your productivity - Women's Agenda

Email overload: How to get your inbox to zero & boost your productivity

To be perfectly honest I rarely open email Press Releases with genuine fervour. This time, however, I couldn’t open it fast enough.

Are you suffering email overload? Work smarter not harder…and get your inbox to zero.

The subject alone felt like a glorious gift from the universe.  

For every 800 emails you have, there will be around 20 that matter. The average worker receives 121 emails a day and checks their email 74 times.  This constant interruption every 4 to 6 minutes during a standard working day is leading to stress, reduced productivity and a constant feeling of pressure.  

Yes! This!!

“Work smarter not harder” says UK’s bestselling author, social entrepreneur and productivity expert Graham Allcott.  “Whenever we speak to corporate management, the number one issue for productivity and stress is email.  What’s important is that it doesn’t need to be that way”. 

The approach he takes is that of anti-guru, that we are humans and not super heroes.  He says “most experts aim for perfection whereas it’s better to start by saying we’re all flawed, we all screw up sometimes and then work from there.”

I couldn’t call him fast enough.

Anyone who works anywhere near me will have heard me lament email. It is the one part of my job that consistently fills me with dread. My inbox feels like a magic pudding that never stops giving and I haven’t developed a strategy for staying on top of it. This is not for lack of effort or commitment. 

I could quite easily sit at my desk from 8am to 5pm answering emails four days a week and possibly be on top of my inbox. This would be problematic however because it would prevent me from being on top of my actual job.

I intensely dislike that I am unable to reply to every email I receive but I am also unable to locate an additional several hours in every day to change that. (I am also genuinely unsure if dedicating excessive time to addressing email is the most productive use of anyone’s skills, energy and time.) I prioritise my job over my inbox and I have come to accept that, but it remains a source of considerable stress.

In 2014 over 108.7 billion emails were sent and received each day in the business world.  Email use will continue to grow in the business sector and by 2018, it is estimated that business email will account for over 139.4 billion emails per day. That terrifies me.

“People learn to feel comfortable with the stress of 2000 emails in their inbox,” Allcott tells me.

The stress lies in the uncertainty; you know not all of those emails are really important but you know some of them are.

“Having 30 or 40 important things in your inbox mixed in with hundreds of other less important emails is stressful because of the uncertainty around your commitment and the extent of your commitment. What matters?”

Exactly! So how do I fix it?

These are 5 tips from Think Productive’s Graham Allcott  which will help tame your inbox and the stress it creates.

  1. Dedicate two hours of uninterrupted time to getting your inbox to zero. “It’s crisper and it’s easier to keep at zero once it’s there,” Allcott says. A few brutal hacks will help you make this happen.
  2. Create three folders: Action, Reading and Waiting. Action is for the work you actually need to do. It’s your working task list.  Reading is where you can send regular newsletters, internals and emails that are good to read but don’t need a response. Waiting is for the emails where you have done your bit and you are waiting to hear back.  “Most people use their inbox for all of those things,” Allcott says. “The stress comes from having the confusion of having everything together.”
  3. Pick a cut-off date half way through your inbox. Create a folder called “Where Emails Go To Die” or something similar and move the second half of your inbox to that file. “It’s like when people de-clutter their homes,” Allcott says. “They put things in a box and if they haven’t needed it for 3 months they can throw it out.” Set a notification for 3 months to ask if you needed any emails in that file.  If not, you can delete. Allcott says what constitutes ‘old’ is dependent upon the industry and field in which you work so professional discretion is required.
  4. Look for big wins. Organise your inbox according to the “From” and look for patterns. “You are trying to cut down on the number of decisions you make,” Alcott says. “You are looking for the quick wins when you can make a decision and deal with a batch of emails.” Look for larger groups of emails from the same person or organisation and deal with them. Now organise your emails by subject-line. ALlcott says most of us with burgeoning inboxes will have several “Out of Office” notification that can be deleted at once. “Keep your brain thinking about the quick wins so change the email view often. Flipping it from Date to From to Subject line helps the brain keep focused on looking for groups instead of getting lost in the minutiae of individuals emails.
  5. Start processing one by one. “Once you have done the hacking then it’s time to process emails one by one,” Allcott says. “If you had 2000 to start with you will probably have 50 or 60 emails now. This is the final part before you get to zero.” If several of those are from the same person, it’s worth scheduling a conversation or a meeting with them to deal with them more efficiently. 

Once your inbox is at zero, or close enough, Allcott says it’s critical to be mindful of how you use email and how it uses you. Email is undoubtedly a great productivity tool but it’s also a huge distraction and can impair productivity.

“You need a little chunk of time in the morning where you work out your priorities for the day before being surrounded or inundated with other people’s priorities which is what emails are,” Allcott says.

He recommends not checking email first thing in the morning.

“If you don’t do that then suddenly you are swept into a vortex of everyone else’s stuff before you have had a chance to be mindful about your own day,” Allcott says.

Before he checks his emails he checks in with himself and sets two key tasks for the day.

“What am I worried about? What am I stressed about? And what are the two things I need to get done?”

The author of “How to be a Productivity Ninja” has undertaken a variety of different email challenges for research purposes, including not looking at email other than on Fridays.

“That is deliberately extreme. Most people would be fired if they did that but you can learn more from the extremities and apply it back to the real world,” he says.  “If you spend a lot of time away from email you have an incredible resource: your attention. It’s easier to think and write when you’re not surrounded and distracted by email.”

His final advice is to be mindful of this and factor it in. Whether you turn your email off for 45 minutes each hour, or you only check email three time a day or your have regular “offline” work sessions each week, your productivity will benefit. 

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