The Secret to Email Productivity for Executives
Written by Renée Safrata - renee@reneevations.com, September 22nd, 2009
Email is a great source of stress and frustration for business leaders and executives. It kills productivity, hinders results and decreases personal motivation. A minor shift in your email management process can produce a major productivity improvement.
Clients tell me on a regular basis, “I get 300 emails a day,” “I have 1200 emails in my inbox ,” “It’s hard to stay on-top of the ‘incoming’ – urghh.”
Checking email, reading email and answering email can take hours of time if you let it. But only if you let it.
I have the secret to email productivity – and it works!
Picture your mailbox at home. Mine is a black metal mailbox affixed to a stone wall. Now, visualize it completely jammed with letters, over-flowing with envelopes.
At home, we don’t treat our mailbox as a storage system. We do not keep letters there for nights upon nights, weekends…forever. No! Every day we remove the mail, sort it and do something with it – open, toss or save for later. That’s the same thing you need to do with your inbox.
Here’s the solution: treat your inbox like a mailbox, not a storage box.
- Create 4-5 folders to prioritize messages. I use ‘Urgent’, ‘Important but Not Urgent’, ‘Awaiting Reply’, ‘Read’, ‘Resources’.
- When mail arrives, SORT into appropriate file folders before doing anything else!
- Deal with the ‘urgent’ emails once your sorting is complete. I look at my urgent emails twice a day.
- Deal with the secondary folders on a regular basis - I check the ‘Important but Not Urgent’ emails every second day and dip into the other files once per week.
In order to make this work, you will have to catch yourself to SORT first and to ‘deal with’ second. On the days when you let this slide, you will quickly notice how your emails get out of hand.
Try it and see how it goes.
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Comments: 16 Responses so far
Renee, I LOVE this idea! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. I’ve created folders for all my jobs and folders for categorizing other emails I want to keep – oh, I’m a great filer – but they’re mostly for archiving messages *after* I’ve dealt with them. Whereas your folders are for sorting them into piles of *how* to deal with them. So simple and elegant! I’m going to try it, starting tomorrow. Thank you!
PS: Love your video this week – so animated!
Renee – take a look at Clear Context. It’s an add-on for Outlook that does things like context-based prioritization, sorting an filing automatically.
It’s a great base for GTD (Getting Things Done) in email.
Hi Mike.
Thanx for the tip – I am sure that fellow readers will appreciated the added info. Thanx!
Next week I will continue the email series with a blog post on checking whether you not you are creating ‘junk-mail’ for others. Looking forward to your comment on that idea.
Renée
Just wanted to follow up to let you know I have been doing this, and it’s REALLY helpful! Thanks, Renee, for the great tip.
Great to hear Avril – keep up the good work and if you have any questions. Let me know and I will post a blog on the answer to your question.
My life has also changed since doing the ‘sort’ first deal with later paradigm shift.
Happy emailing.
Renée
Love – love – love this!!! Thank you…
Hi Stephanie – so glad you ‘love-love-love’ this. Try it out for 14 days and come back to let all of us know how it worked for you!
Please share the link with your co-workers as well.
Happy ‘emails’ to you!
Renée
http://www.reneevations.com
Victoria February 9th, 2010
Learned something similar at a seminar last July and it decreased my email time drastically. After using the system for a couple of months, I tweaked the folder names to match how I think of the process, but it’s the same general idea and works beautifully. You have to be disciplined about getting back to your lower level files at least weekly, though, or they start to suffer from overload just like your inbox used to.
lyle hildahl February 9th, 2010
I too loved the animated video. i will give it a try Renee. it totally makes sense.
Lyle
Bruce Beckett February 9th, 2010
I use this technique, although not daily. It works; but I always neglect checking those “read” files. Ah..we will get better!!
Great Lyle – let me know how it goes.
Blocking your calendar to dive into those less urgent but important files (on a weekly basis) will help as well. Sort HO!
Renée
renee@reneevations.com
Teran Petrina February 15th, 2010
This one resonated with me well and offered me the best suggestions. I hang onto email much longer than necessary and use my inbox as a file keeper.
Will try the suggested folders and the rules mentioned in the latter elearning.
Camille February 16th, 2010
Thanks for the re-enforcement on email management. It reminds me of what works and that I need to discipline myself to stay in the process.
Sonyaa March 14th, 2011
I began using this system last week for my boss’ inbox; and while it has made prioritizing emails more efficient (THANK YOU, THANK YOU!) I could use a bit more assistance.
For instance, after he reads an email, sometimes follow up is needed, but time doesn’t permit at that moment. And because he gets hundreds a day, the majority of which have a degree of importance, how can I best organize them for further follow up?
What seems logical for me would be to add another folder for follow ups but, due to his busy schedule, I cannot rely on him to move respective emails to a respective folder consistently. In the interim, I have asked him to delete items that are “worked” which causes an automatic float to another folder and it is from there that I file the previous week’s emails. Sounds simple enough but the problem there is that Outlook won’t show some of these emails when going back to reference them for one reason or another. We’ve had to use the Recall Deleted Items function several times, and while this is a fix, it doesn’t seem to be the most efficient process. What do you recommend for individuals such as myself who manage large volumes of emails for others. We get in excess of 500 emails weekly. A small percentage is personal and junk mail.
Hi Sonyaa.
Thank you for your comment. You are right this is really email management 101, there is so much more to add.
So you ask the question about email follow-up.
First thing I find really useful is to read the message briefly and then to forward the message back to the same email address. ie: I read an email sent to me, Renée and I now forward it back to me…this time however, I change the subject line. For example: “FOLLOW-UP DUE MAR. 25TH: Get Back to Suzy on Budget Approval”. I then hit send. When this email appears I delete the previous.
I can choose to place this in a separate folder as you suggested folders could be ”FOLLOW-UP BY WEEK END” or “FOLLOW-UP” or you may choose to place in your “URGENT” file. Whatever file it goes into you now have the ability to sort using the term “FOLLOW-UP” they will all be presented to you in order of due date.
We also make it a practice to enter the project name at the beginning of all subject lines so that email sorting is much more seamless.
My team-mate Kathy, utilizes the colour feature for her emails. If we looked in one of her folders today, we would find “urgent” emails in red, “follow-ups” in green, “waiting to hear” in purple etc.
Is this helpful? Let us know there are so many tricks and tips to discuss. But, most important – we need to find the system that works and then make it an agreed norm for all on our team.
Renée
Sonyaa August 29th, 2011
Good feedback, Renée. Over the last several months I’ve continued to put your advice to work in my inbox, and I have found the concept of treating the inbox as a home mailbox to be brilliant and a time saver.
The same, however, didn’t quite work for my boss because he travels 80% of the time and uses an iPhone/Pad as well as a Windows PC, which are two different operating systems. Features such as flagging just do not transfer over from Windows to MAC, at least we’ve not been successful in doing so, even with the help of our IT department (which incidentally does not support MAC).
Also some features like color coding are available only as a local setting which, though I have ownership of his inbox files on my computer, do not show up on his computer by default. I’ve worked with our IT department in an attempt to work this out but the limitation is with the software and/or networking.
And then there’s the factor of preference. He doesn’t favor looking through various folders. We have one folder for current projects; that’s all. Our system now is manual in that if there’s an email needing further follow-up, I print it out. I guess you can call it “stoneage email management” but it works for us.
Thanks again for your wisdom. I’ll continue to use it for my own inbox.
September 23rd, 2009