Ditch bad email habits to save hours a week
Dealing with email is like playing Whaca-Mole. Just when you think you’re caught up, another round of messages pop up, making it a never-ending job.
While many of us have a love/hate relationship with email, the stress it causes could be user-driven, says Nick Sonnenberg, author of “Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work.”
“I think people struggle with email because they’ve been using it for a long time, and they’ve developed bad habits,” he says. “They don’t know when or how to best use it. And no matter what company you’re at, email is the one tool that you’re always using.”
Compounding the problem is that the barrier to email is so low. “It’s easy to send, and it’s free, which is causing more and more emails to arrive,” Sonnenberg says. “Email is an external to-do list that others can add to.”
Since many of us spend a significant amount of the workweek on email, it can cause a loss of productivity. However, if you get rid of these four bad habits, Sonnenberg says, you can reclaim up to two hours a week.
Using email as your communication default
To use email the right way, you need to know its purpose. “People use email to communicate internally with their team, such as delegating tasks and projects,” Sonnenberg says. “That’s not what it’s built for.”
Instead, email should be reserved for external communication to clients, vendors and partners. Internal communication should be done with internal communication tools, such as Slack or Asana.
“Just moving these conversations somewhere else reduces the volume of emails significantly,” Sonnenberg says. “The functionality that those other tools offer optimizes what needs to get done for that task or conversation you’re trying to have.”
Creating lots of folders
Another mistake is having too many folders. Sonnenberg says folders can turn email into a game of hot potato, where you think you’re optimizing your time by transfering messages as fast as possible, but you’re really not getting ahead. Organizing with folders requires that you pause and put the email into the right bucket.
“People think it’s helpful, but it takes a few seconds to read and drag it into another folder,” he says. “If you waste three seconds on an email and you’re getting
100 emails a day, that’s 300 seconds or five minutes a day you’re wasting. By the end of the week, it’s 25 minutes, and by the end of the month, it’s almost two hours.”
When you need to find an email, you’ll then need to scroll through a folder, which takes more time.
Instead, Sonnenberg suggests optimizing your email for the retrieval of information by archiving them.
To find an email, you can simply search by name, date range or subject. Reserve folders for things that aren’t easily searchable, such as product or restaurant recommendations.
Deleting emails
Sonnenberg also doesn’t recommend deleting emails. Instead of having to decide if an email is deletable or better archived, archive all of them.
“Every decision that you have to make creates decision fatigue,” he says. “You have so much cloud storage nowadays. Even if you know with 100% certainty you will never need that email again, archive it and remove one thing you ever need to think about.”
If your email storage becomes full, Sonnenberg suggests searching for the biggest files in your archive and deleting a few of them to free up space.
Keeping emails in your inbox
A lot of people misunderstand the concept of “Inbox Zero,” making the mistake that zero is how many emails are unread, Sonnenberg says. “Zero means read or unread,” he says. “It’s how many emails are in your inbox.”
Just having hundreds or even thousands of emails in your inbox is distracting. Plus, Sonnenberg says it’s hard to know what you’ve dealt with and what you haven’t. Instead, he suggests dealing with email by adopting a RAD system, which stands for “reply, archive or defer” any email that you get.
“There are only three things you can do with an email,” Sonnenberg says. “You can either reply right away if it’s actionable, getting back to the person. You can archive it, meaning there’s nothing left for you to do, you don’t care, you don’t need it or there’s no actions to take. When you archive it, it’s searchable, but it’s out of your inbox or your to-do list.”
The third is to defer, which is a step that Sonnenberg says most people aren’t utilizing. This is when you snooze an email to handle it later. For example, Gmail users can hover over an email to see a clock icon.
“It’s one of the most powerful features that most people aren’t taking advantage of,” Sonnenberg says. “If you have an email you can’t deal with today, but you’ve blocked time next Friday to deal with the situation, snooze the email until you’re ready. It will leave your inbox and magically come back next Friday.”