John Cox

Organize your E-Mail

For an introduction to this article, please read the basis of my 7 Habits for Highly Productive people. I will probably have to change the title of this once I hear from Covey's lawyers, but in the meantime it works for me.

Email is fast becoming the biggest time waster for any employee at a company. The higher up the chain you go, the less work that you accomplish because of the time demands around constant and immediate access. What should be an effective communication means has become a crutch for most of us, and a stress generator as well. Our email boxes probably look to be a never ending pile of work, which tend to depress rather than encourage a productive work setting. My goal, and I would assume yours as well, is to spend more time being productive, so we can spend less time catching up when we should be spending time refreshing our minds and enjoying the reasons that we work: leisure and families.

While many of these tips outlined work well for me, they may not necessarily work well for you. I would love to hear more ideas, as I am not an expert preaching productivity at work. Rather, I am person that is trying to spend less time at home working. Should you have any additions, feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail (hehe!) on the matter. I will update this article to reflect it with full credit given once the series of article end up in my tutorial section.

Onward and upward with the tips and suggestions.

Problem #1: The black hole, otherwise known as my email box

A year ago, at any given time, I would have thousands of emails taking space in my box. They were all unorganized, and many were replies upon replies. I was getting known as the person that never returns an email because I didn't know where to begin. It was hurting my customers, and it was hurting my reputation within my organization. "I must have missed that email" was a common response that I would have to give while standing in front of my customers, or in meetings with my boss. I have to say that there is no worse sinking feeling to a person that prides themselves on being prepared and armed with knowledge.

I discovered though that I was using my BLACKHOLE as a crutch. I used the excuse to myself that I needed ready access to any correspondence that I might have received in the past year. What I found was I rarely, if ever, used the search feature on Outlook, because I was too busy making making excuses for my behavior. I am a very goal oriented individual, so I made the following goals for myself which have greatly improved my email behavior.

E-Mail does not equate to online file storage.

I know that it is a great feeling to fire back an email in response to someone that said "You never said that". I know it is as equally great feeling to nag someone one by sending out a reminder which is a forwarded response to something that you sent earlier, but now you are justified in copying the bosses as well. This is a natural defensive behavior that once again is playing the blame game. It also does not require you to have thousands of emails in your In-Box at any given time. Stop using your email as an extra hard-drive (tips below) as it will get you into trouble in the long run.

Go through your email this week and learn how to "File->Save As" and liberally hit the "Delete" button on anything that is not actionable, or on anything that is actionable but you have missed the time sensitivity window. For instance, you may well find (I certainly did) a question that was posed months ago that you missed. If you like, pose a response and send it, or for embarrassment sake just delete it. Once you have your email box down to a reasonable size, repeat the process. Keep repeating the process until you can say:

I have a goal of only five actionable emails in my In-Box on Friday.

The perfect world would be to have zero actionable items in your email box on Friday, but lets be realistic. An email comes in at 4PM on Friday, you may not have the time to do the research to give a well thought out response on Friday. What comes in on Friday in the afternoon can reasonably wait until Monday morning (emergencies not withstanding). This is behavior that we have trained in others. Immediate reaction, or no reaction. Sink or swim when someone sends us an email. We need to retrain that behavior by setting the bar higher in our responses and resetting the expectation of when you are responding to your emails.

Once your email box is down to our actionable goal, we can now move forward with our working in serial premise (more on that in a later article). Set your priorities of responses by what is sitting in your email box, rather than trying to remember a hundred different things from a hundred different sources. Once you have finished the actionable item, whether that be a response back via email, or phone call, or a meeting, File -> Save As / Delete the item from your mail box. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Problem #2: Searching past correspondence, or how do I exist in the corporate environment without a record of what I said?

I stated above what I good feeling it is to respond to an email with an original response. I also stated that it does nothing for our organization to have that feeling, and place others on the defensive. However, that does not negate the fact that we do need to recognize the fact that we are often in need of a record of our correspondence, for legal and CYOA reasons. I live in the real world as well, and understand these needs.

If we are going to manage our own email better, it makes absolutely no sense what so ever to Save and Delete without a forethought of organization for finding these past actionable and information emails later. We will just be in the same unorganized hole that we started, but now we can't use the search functionality that is built into our email clients. Here are some tips that I have found to overcome these objections.

Use NNTP or Gmail

Outlook and other email clients that we use now a days are wonderful things. There are a wealth of tools that are associated to create message rules that can simulate the same online storage that we are used to working with. However, this becomes a storage of history rather than a collage of action items, information, and history. I have found two ways to do this. While I prefer the second (G-Mail), I can understand not wanting your organization's historical responses in another company's control. However, setting up an NNTP (newsgroup) may not be within your control and you may have some internal resistance.

For either of these two to be used, the settings are about the same. It is a two step process that you need to do. The first is to set up a message rule for any incoming mail to be automatically forwarded to your new account. The second step is to automatically BCC any email that you send. Unfortunately, at this writing, I have not been able to figure out how to create a message rule in OutLook that does this. Thunderbird has no problem what so ever, but I view Thunderbird as most CIO's do, a replacement for Outlook Express, and not Outlook itself. This tutorial walks you through adding a script for automatic BCC of your email. As sensitive as I am about my time, I am just a cheap. I hate buying a plugin when I can find code on the web that will help me do the exact thing.

Use your file system

Irregardless of whether or not you use an NNTP or other account as your backup for online file storage, you should also keep a copy of your correspondence on your file system as well. If you are as anal as I am, and as high maintenance as I, you may well want to keep a copy of your sent items as well, and not just items that end up in your in-box.

Here is how I do it. I created a root folder in My Documents. From there, I have folders called "Customers", "Peers", "Bosses", "Information". In each of those folders I break down the individual folks that I am working with by name so I have several sub folders underneath. When I save an email, I also prefix it with the date in the file name, so that I might be able to search on it just a little quicker, than relying on Windows date stamp to do the trick. The date stamp that is generated is when the file was either created or modified, which does not necessarily help me when I am searching (see above for an example of creating thousands of files in a day on our initial clean-up). Now, I have in my laptop the exact correspondence that I need at any given time, while my in-box stays clean.

Problem #3: How do I stop the swirl?

Perhaps I am not using the correct term here (swirl), but I believe that I picked up the noun along the way for innocent responses that go up and down the chain of command which in the end make me look bad and cause me unneeded work. If I did not pick it up from anyone earlier, then I can not think of a better way to describe this phenomena. To restate my goals, I want to work, but just not on my own time. Swirl is another productivity killer that can be lessened by you, but should not be tolerated by any organization.

Swirl happens because we all work in unhealthy organizations. We work in organizations that allow others to be one-upped, to be blamed, and to expect excuses rather than to accept that we are all human. I have found that quite a few "emergencies" are simply the result of swirl and could have been avoided in the first place if I had written a more thought out reply, or not put a person on the defensive. Below are my suggestions to not only make your life easier, but your entire organization's as well:

Copy intelligently and phrase intelligently

This is within your power, and often times we teach others to do the same. If we go off half-baked and copy the senior management team, every boss in our organization, and every peer for a request then expect that you place others on the defensive. This is the root cause of swirl within any organization. In the end, it will bite you square in the behind from someone that has the need to get even. Beyond revenge though, often times the swirling email will end up causing us more work due to the fact that we are mistaken in an assumption or two. However innocent your intentions it only stirs a hornets nest. Repeat after me, "I will only send an email to who needs to respond". If they want to send it to everyone in the organization, then let them, but do your part in combating swirl.

The second step is to phrase intelligently. If you can pack in your thoughts in a quick single paragraph email which has need / action requested, do that. Brevity is an admirable trait within an organization, and you tend to get a much better response. If you can't pack the what you need into a single paragraph, then pick up the phone during your set aside response time (see habit number four). Follow up your phone call with an informational email. Here is what I am going to do, and here is what you agreed to do. Informational emails are always much better than the actionable emails to send and read.

Use the BCC

Another step in reducing swirl and becoming more productive is to use the BCC wisely. You should treat any email that has you on the BCC line as an informational email only. File it. Learn to use the BCC instead of the CC field. At the very least when you get an email from someone that doesn't have the company's entire address book copied, it puts you at ease. Wouldn't you want to know that an issue exists, but would rather let the experts fix the issue? It's call giving your people control over a situation. It's called not micro-managing a situation. If you give a manager an opportunity to micro-manage, then most often they will.

Obviously, the BCC can come back and bite you square in the pants as well. If you BCC someone and they respond to the situation, then you have your recipient not knowing who the original email was sent to. This could cause some trust issues, but in all the time that I have been using the BCC, I have not had problems. I can not think of a single example of when it came back negatively on me. It has caused me less work though and given me a chance to finish my normal responsibilities, which is after all, what we are after.

Sum it up

Don't be a slave to your email box. Email is here to stay, and it is a wonderful tool. However, it can be one the biggest reasons you are working on the weekend rather than spending time building a model with your child. Which would you rather do?

Don't allow your email to be a crutch for not getting your work done. Use the application for what it is, a tool for productivity. Don't use it as a second hard drive. It becomes depressing to see how much work that we have to do, when it is possibly 80% already done. Feel better by having a cleaner in-box.

Finally, don't participate in the Swirl of an Organization. Possibly, the most important lesson, and the biggest time killer of them all. It will happen beyond your control, but please, don't start it. Control what you can, and don't worry about the things outside of your control. One final thought about swirl is best summed up in the business serenity prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I cannot accept,
And the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill today because they pissed me off.