Episode 35: Two Deadly Sins of Email

Transcript

So let's talk about what I consider to be the two deadly sins of email.
So first of all, it's not that these are problems with email inherently, to be fair.
These are really problems culturally within companies or for people themselves or whatever that email kind of enables.
The other thing I want to mention is that this is really targeted towards people who spend a good portion of time as part of their work dealing with email.
If your job doesn't really entail much email interaction, then this doesn't really apply to you.
It's not really a thing you probably struggle with.
Some of this maybe applies to personal life, but probably not most of it.
I'm pretty sure email is going to survive the heat death of the universe.
It's going to be email and cockroaches, you know, and there's still going to be like marketing bots somewhere spamming people with email who are long gone.
It's a very resilient and multi-purpose tool, which is why it has, you know, persisted so well.
And internally, there's other tools these days that are better for internal communication, you know, various instant messaging platforms, you got Slack, you got Teams, you got, but in terms of intercompany and inter, yeah, interorganizational communication between organizations, email still is a very efficient tool for that.
But that kind of brings up my first deadly sin here.
What I would say is that the first big problem with email is when people start treating it like a to-do list for themselves.
Some of this goes back, there's a podcast called Back to Work with a guy named Merlin Mann on it, and I've been following that podcast on and off for, you know, quite a long time.
But years ago, there was a whole segment or series or grouping of episodes where he spoke quite a lot about getting things done, which is a book by a gentleman whose name I am now forgetting.
I'll link to it, but Merlin, the host of this Back to Work show, was a big proponent and follower of some of the methodologies that were prescribed in this getting things done book.
But one of the pieces that he talked about a lot during these segments was this, and this really changed my viewpoint on a lot of things productivity-wise.
Because your to-do list should be under your control.
You, as a presumably knowledge worker, should have control over what you put on a list.
Now, I'm not saying that you're fully autonomous, or like, you probably have a boss, and they probably tell you to do things, and that's fine.
But the idea that you are maintaining your own list of tasks that need to get done is very important for productivity purposes.
The problem with allowing your email, and I'm guilty of this, of allowing your email to become your to-do list is you have now relinquished control of your to-do list to everyone else on the planet.
But anyone, if your general way of dealing with things is to read an email, mark it as unread, and then be like, okay, I'm going to come back and deal with that later.
And if that's like your main way of remembering what you have to do through the day, or what, or not even remembering, but prioritizing what you need to do for the day.
That means that everyone else on the planet is able to put an item on your to-do list.
And that's both very intrusive and very unproductive.
Because if you don't get to kind of order your day and prioritize your day in a way that makes sense to get through the things you need to get through,
and if you allow everybody else to be putting things on that to-do list, that's a real problem.
Now, what's suggested out of this, and again, I'm guilty of this, like I have gone through plenty of phases in my career where I've operated that way.
And it's terrible. It's terrible every time. Like, even if it's not terrible at first, it becomes terrible eventually.
But the recommended approach to move away from this is that you kind of keep your own to-do list somewhere.
It could be on a piece of paper. It could be in a, you know, an app somewhere that you use.
It could be on some, you know, project management tool if that's what you're into. Like, whatever.
But as emails come in, X times a day, and it depends on your dynamic and everything, but let's call it once every two hours.
Once every two hours, you look at your email, you go through those items, and you decide, is this something that needs to be on my to-do list?
Do I need to respond to this email at all? Is there any action item here, or is this just something I can just read and be done with?
And if it is an item that must be on your to-do list, mark that email as read and put it on your to-do list, wherever that is.
Whether it's a piece of paper again, or some app, or Trello, or like, whatever it is you use.
That movement of transcribing from essentially this email, you know, funnel into you, into your life, over to something that you have some control over, that mental split does make a big difference.
And then you can figure out how to prioritize these things.
Now, if you want to get more down that getting things done methodology thing, he suggests things like having an inbox, like in your to-do world, you kind of have an inbox and an in-process list and a completed list, and you kind of move things through a process.
There's also a time where you take all of your inbox items and you sort of process them and decide, oh, is this something that I'm ever going to do anything with?
Should I just table this?
Should I put it into an in-progress state?
Should I put it on my list for tomorrow?
Like, there's nuances there.
You can get kind of nerdy about it.
But at the very least, just minimum baseline, if you're using your email and you're doing that, like, mark on red thing and then coming back to it later and that becomes how you manage your days, just try it.
Try having a separate list somewhere and only one.
You can't have multiple if this whole thing falls apart, but put it somewhere and don't just leave your inbox as a bunch of unread nonsense because that's how it just backs up and floods over.
This is related to the second deadly sin of email from my perspective.
The thing that makes email so good and so useful and so important is that unlike a Slack or something, you can send an email to anyone.
This is really important for a lot of reasons.
It's a great way, again, to discuss things across company boundaries.
It is, for better or for worse, a great way for marketers and salespeople to try to get a hold of other people, you know, that they're trying to sell things to.
I'm not sure I should say a great way, but it's a way.
That ability to communicate across boundaries is really important.
However, the longer you're at a company and the more conferences you go to or the more events you attend or the more vendors you work with or whatever, the more and more and more lists you get on.
Before you know it, your email becomes this signal-to-noise problem where you are getting tons of volume of email and maybe only a sliver of it is actually things that you need to see or need to deal with on a daily basis.
This very much happened to me at my last job.
I had been there a long time and my email had just gotten completely out of control and it didn't matter how many things I unsubscribed from or anything else.
It got to the point where I'd walk away from my desk for 10-15 minutes and I'd come back and it was just, you know, 10-15 new things and maybe one of them was from someone I actually had to work with.
So, this is a harder problem to solve, I think, than the first problem.
And I'll tell you in a minute what I did, but what I did probably won't work for most people.
This is a much harder problem to solve because you're fighting against what email is good at, which is that cross-boundary thing.
And I've seen people take different approaches to this.
I've seen people who very much manage their email via a bunch of folders and they move stuff around and they put things over here, they put things over there.
That's not me.
Like, I don't have that kind of OCD organizational need in myself.
That just doesn't work for me.
I need something more automated, something that helps me limit the volume where I don't have to be maintaining it.
It's like, for me, that, what is it, the cure is worse than the problem or whatever.
Like, for me, if I went to a system where I was organizing every single email that came in, it would be worse than just ignoring every single email that came in.
It would be just as distracting probably more.
So, here's what I did.
I came up with a short list.
I think originally it was like 20.
And then I think eventually it grew to, you know, more than that, 30 or 35, 40, something like that.
But I came up with my first 20 companies that I knew I should be interacting with.
You know, I managed, in my job, I managed a bunch of vendors.
So, like, there was a bunch of vendors that I knew I was actively working with.
So, I came up with those, with that short list of however money it was.
And I got their email domain.
So, for instance, if you were working with xyzcompany.com, the email addresses would be, you know, john at xyzcompany.com.
So, I built that list of the atwhatevers.coms all the way down, that last part of the email address.
And I set up an email rule.
And the first email rule was move all of my email to a folder called, and I called it everything else.
So, my first email rule, literally, I built a folder.
It was called everything else.
I took every single email that came into my inbox, all of them, and they went to everything else.
Then the second set of rules in my inbox, or in my email, was, if you're one of these email addresses, you know, at xyzcompany, whatever, whatever that list of 20 was, then I would move it back into my inbox.
And the purpose of this was to filter out everything that I knew, that I didn't know I was actively working with.
Now, this is probably not realistic for most people.
However, if you're in a job where most of your email traffic is internal to your company, you might be able to do this and just weed out all the garbage that comes in.
It's a very aggressive approach.
And you're not deleting it.
It's sitting in a folder.
And I did miss some things along the way.
What I have to do is I have to go find them over in that other folder, and I would dig up that email address, and I would add it to my list of addresses that were okay.
And then from there on out, it would be all right.
Only you can really judge whether this is good for you or not.
But that was sort of the solution I came up with.
And boy, did it help.
It helped so much.
It made it so that I was able to respond so much better to all the people that I really needed to be working with on a daily basis.
So to me, those are the two really deadly sins of email.
It's email being too easy to accidentally become your to-do list.
And to fix that, you need some intentionality around really making sure you're maintaining a separate to-do list that is not your inbox, and you're moving kind of things from one spot to the other, and only the things that actually belong on a to-do list.
And then it's just managing the sheer volume of email is sort of the second big problem.
And again, I took a pretty aggressive approach to this.
There are other ways to handle it, but after several failed attempts at things, this is what I came up with, and it worked pretty well for me.
So look, if you're someone who a huge part of your work is dealing with email, I wish you the best of luck.
It's a difficult – it becomes a cumbersome thing.
And spending a little bit of intentional time of how to deal with that and not let it become just an overwhelming catastrophe is time well spent.