8 Ways Not to Manage Your Email (and 5

and a Half Tactics that Work)

by Sarah Green | 12:00 PM April 11, 2014
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In 1635, Englands Charles I expanded the islands mail delivery service to the public with
postage paid by the recipient and based on the weight of the letter. If Great Aunt Henrietta wrote
you a 10-page letter asking why you werent married yet, throughout most of the country you
paid for the privilege of receiving it. It wasnt until 1840 that the Royal Mail switched to a
system in which postage was prepaid by the sender.
I think of this fact often when checking my email. I hope it doesnt take 200 years to figure out
how to make the initiators of these messages rather than their beleaguered recipients bear
the burden of their sending. But until then, recipients have to manage. And often, we have to
manage without the kind of administrative support 20th century executives relied on.
Two years ago, frustrated by this state of affairs, I published a cri de coeur on this site railing
against the lamentable state of inboxes everywhere. Making my despair public had an
unanticipated side effect: I started hearing from people whod discovered tips and tools that
could help. In the months since, Ive experimented with a range of different options. There were
several oft-recommended tactics that failed utterly for me, and a few that did work. The way I
see it, weve got to band together to defeat the email Hydra, so heres what worked for me and
what didnt. Notably, most of the successful tactics had less to do with email and more to do with
general time management although there were two important exceptions.
What worked:
I stopped seeing it as separate from my real work. In the information economy, email is
real work. So I made a conscious decision to stop looking at email as something that took
me away from important work and start viewing it as part of building relationships
something thats really important to me. Once I made this mindset shift, it was easier to
make time for email.
I stopped using email to manage my to-do list. This post describes my pre-conversion life
pretty well: Id leave important messages marked as unread to remember to come back to
them later (but then theyd get buried by new messages fairly quickly) and Id email to-
do lists to myself. Having tried paper to-do lists and several different task tracking apps
(including one that transformed my list into a quest though I never advanced beyond
Junior Ent Sapling) Ive finally settled on Trello, which is super-simple and has a
fantastic app/desktop integration.
I stopped allowing days of back-to-back meetings. I used to let my calendar get filled up
with meetings; at the end of the day, I would return to an inbox filled with hundreds of
unread messages and a sinking feeling in my heart. I tried to fight back by blocking out
large chunks of my calendar a couple of times a week, but my coworkers, seeing a 2-hour
meeting in my calendar would know it was a fake and book me anyway. Now I book
30-min or 1-hour meetings at random times throughout my week, so that I always have
about two hours free per day. (Try to catch me now, suckers!)
Two weeks before I go on vacation, I put the dates Ill be away in my email signature.
This is a much better way of giving colleagues a heads-up than a mass email message,
which few people will read or remember, and it lets me deal with last-minute requests
before I leave so that I can fully disconnect while Im away. When I return, I steadfastly
avoid meetings for a couple of days so that I can catch up. Unless you are a sitting head
of state, I dont see why you should have to check your work email from a vineyard in
Tuscany, or the back of a burro in the mountains of Patagonia, or sitting by grandmas
Christmas tree. I realize that some peoples bosses are unreasonable about this; part of
why I work at HBR is to convince these bosses that they are wrong.
I stopped expecting a human brain to solve a problem created by technology. I used to
feel bad really bad when important emails would get lost in the impenetrable wall
of unimportant near-spam that took over my inbox every day. (No, I do not think HBR
should publish an article on the start-up selling a toilet seat for cats, but thank you, Ms.
Publicist, for suggesting it three times.) I finally accepted that this was a technology
problem that required a technological solution. After looking into a few options, I
installed SaneBox, a filtering system that uses an algorithm to decide which emails are
the most important. Those are shunted into your inbox, which suddenly looks much less
cluttered; the rest go into a SaneLater folder. I go through the SaneLater folder every
other day to make sure nothing crucial is languishing in there. I also started using
Unroll.me, which combines your newsletter subscriptions into one daily digest and
unsubscribes you from the lists you dont want to be on.
I use my smartphone much more. (This is the half tactic.) While most of the published
advice Ive read on managing email urged me to avoid relying on my phone, Ive
found that it helps me craft quicker responses that get right to the point (in case you
havent noticed already, I have a tendency towards the verbose). And since it says sent
from my phone in the signature, people arent as likely to be offended by brevity.
What didnt work:
Checking email at certain times of the day only. This frequently suggested tactic has
never worked for me. When Ive tried, I end up reading and answering email straight
through until my next appointed check-in time; or I get left out of important online
conversations happening among my colleagues between my check-in times; or I miss
timely messages.
Strategic use of out-of-office messages. Ive tried putting up an auto-response if theres a
day I really am booked in meetings or when Im simply buried in deadlines and trying to
get manuscripts out the door; my recipients found this defensive. For longer breaks, Ive
also tried the trick of saying, Please re-send your message when I am back in the office
on such-and-such date, another widely cited tactic. Recipients found that arrogant.
Keeping emails incredibly short. Its one thing to be concise; its another to
omit both salutation and sign-off and punctuation. As an editor, sending these sorts of
emails (sounds great thanks) bothered me on a personal level. Did I really not have
time to say Hello, Professor Fitz-Herbert or insert a comma? Really? These super-brief
emails made me feel icky. I also think they made me sound like kind of an asshole.
Aiming for Inbox Zero. I think we will look back on the brief craze for Inbox Zero the
way we now look back at the 80s aerobics craze: evidence of a mad and ultimately
warping desire for perfection. Inboxes are not meant to be at zero any more than
womens upper thighs are meant to look like aluminum tubes. I now aim to keep the
unread messages in my inbox to the double-digits. When things start ballooning up, I
sigh, get into to work a little earlier, and hammer away at them until theyre back down to
size the same way I reluctantly (but temporarily) switch from pastrami to arugula
when my favorite jeans feel tight.
Following the only handle it once, rule. This is a really difficult one for most
knowledge workers, not only editors. Thinking takes time. Sometimes even answering a
simple yes-or-no question means asking for other peoples input, doing background
reading, or conducting a bit of research. I can usually make those judgment calls fairly
efficiently or else I wouldnt be good at my job but I cant do it obeying the
OHIO rule.
Setting up elaborate folder systems. How can a person who barely has time to read her
email possibly have time to sort it? Thats what the search box is for.
Asking other people to change their behavior. I did try asking people to put key
information in the subject line, use the Red Exclamation Point of Doom if and only if
it was truly an urgent message, or to send me one email with all of their questions
rather than five short emails each with a different query. Despite the efforts of a few
(which I appreciated!), by and large this was a predictably Quixotic quest.
Complaining. Treating email like the enemy made important people hesitant to email me;
Id be left out of important conversations because, Sarahs always so busy. Instead of
being able to dip in and out of the discussion based on what I thought was important,
people started turning off the spigot. I was not a fan of that, as it turned out.
My reformation is far from complete. Messages still slip through the cracks. A bad flu messes up
my entire carefully constructed system. And I still get irritated when people send a second email
just to make sure you got my email! especially if 24 hours havent elapsed since the first
message. (With tools like Signals, no one needs to ask that question anymore.) But since
becoming more disciplined about managing my email, I find I get fewer of those messages.
There is an old saying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: to drink from a firehose, you
need to use a straw. If email is the firehose, apps like Signals, Trello, SaneBox, and others are
the straws. And modern missivists can at least be thankful that, unlike the letter-writers of 17th
century Britain, we have keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste.