By: Zachary Bouck, CFP®
Keeping on top of communication and work projects is extremely challenging. Many workers spend much of their day staring at their email inbox instead of doing meaningful proactive work. (I would cite a source, but the real source is me looking over people's shoulders to see what’s on their screen) Here’s how to clean out your inbox, and manage your email inbox from an extreme procrastinator, with a pretty good process for staying on top of communication.
When to email
Let’s start with when we SHOULD be using emails. An email is a middle-of-the-road tool. Email should be a quick communication to:
- Organize a long conversation outside of email (Group Project Work)
- Follow up on the status of a project in one business day (Administrative Work)
- Set up or co-ordinate a meeting (Scheduling)
- Accumulate information for a meaningful project or input (Deep Work)
Long conversations are best left to phone calls, meetings, and in-person conversations. If you have an email that requires a long conversation, respond by asking for a meeting. Then delete the email, and put a note in your CRM to follow up in a certain amount of time. As soon as I find myself spending more than a few minutes on an email – I usually just pick up the phone and call, or simply respond with “Let’s schedule a quick call to discuss on this day – how is 10 am?”
Email is best for short conversations or quick questions that are not time-sensitive. The way I think about it is every email should be responded to within 24 hours, but the flip side of that is that I don’t expect a response before one business day. Immediate responses are for phone calls / instant messages and texts.
- Instant messaging gets a little tricky. Below is a list of my current inboxes
o Work Email
o Work Voicemail
o Personal Email
o Personal Voicemail
o Personal Text Messages
o Zoom Messages
Many people (i.e. me procrastinating at 7 pm at night) simply cycle through their inboxes looking for things to respond to….if you’re in a primarily reactive role (think inbound calls/messages) this setup is what you may be forced to deal with. If you’re in a job that requires proactive and thoughtful work, this is a disaster.
We’ve discussed what emails are for – Organizing a long conversation outside of email, following up on the status of a project, setting up or coordinating a meeting, and accumulating information for a meaningful project. What are emails not good for?
When to not email.
What is email not for? Email is not for quick responses, not for LONG responses, and not a way to spend the majority of your day. Email is a middle-of-the-road tool for conversations and compiling data for future meetings and projects.
When should you check emails?
A lot of guru types tell you to have email blocks over certain times per day. This is really smart, and if you can do it, you should! I am terrible at this. For me as a business owner/father/husband/Financial advisor/CIO my days are varied, so while I could block off 12-1 on my calendar to send emails – the truth is when I’ve tried that I rarely do it.
Here’s how I approach this. I love inbox zero – and that’s how I try and end my day.
After the project work, meeting work, administrative work, and proactive work are done for the day, before I hang up my hat and become husband / parent / chef / movie critic, I get to inbox zero. To do this, I process every email before the day is done.
Be committed to processing EACH email as you open it. If you’re not in a position to take an action on an email immediately, then WHY THE HELL ARE YOU READING EMAILS? I am guilty of perusing emails at stoplights, in elevators, in bed, and on the toilet. What I’m really doing is looking for emergencies that I may need to forward quickly. Guess what? Email is not an EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION TOOL. Have you ever emailed 911? What does the emailer expect of you if you’re in a meeting? On a plane? Emails are sloooooowwww communication. So take the burden off of yourself to think of email as rapid communication and TAKE EMAIL OFF OF YOUR PHONE.
It's a revolutionary idea, and I know a lot of folks (people who travel a lot for work for example) where this strategy would not be ideal. But for those of us who work in an office environment the majority of the time, that time is when you should be processing emails – not while you’re on the go.
Examples of various emails I get and how I respond.
Project Work – I manage investment portfolios and I get a lot of data from various sources. If I get an email with economic information – I don’t read it quickly and delete it. I drag it into a folder labeled
‘March 2022 Investment Research’
Then when I’m ready to do deep thinking on investing I open that folder.
Financial Planning questions – If I get an email from a client that says something like “Zak how much can I contribute to my SEP this year? I respond “Kevin – got your email, we need some information like total income, total deductions, etc, let’s schedule a quick call to go through what we need. How is x time on y date?”
Here’s where a lot of folks are messing it up. DON’T LEAVE THAT EMAIL IN YOUR INBOX!!!! Communication complete, project initiated, go create a to-do in a CRM or keep a list OFF OF YOUR EMAIL to follow up on that project. Don’t clog up your email!!!
What happens if you write a quick email response like… “Sounds good Kevin, we need your income tax deductions, gross income for the year, and your bank account information.” HE responds with ‘do you need all my income or just the income from the associated business?’ CAN OF WORMS OPENED UP!!!! This email spawns 10 more and now you’re bogged down doing things inefficiently.
Don’t open the door to more emails – it is a time and idea inefficient way to communicate.
Internal Communication – Emails like – “Zak do you want to go with your client to the thing?
Response option one – Sure Thursday at 10 works for me.
Response option 2 - Yes! Call me quick to work out the details.
As a reminder, the majority of my emails can be distilled into these 4 categories:
Deep work
Ongoing projects
Meetings
Administrative
Deep work gets compiled, and Ongoing projects get a quick response either with an answer to the question or a verbal conversation. Meetings get set either quickly or via phone. Administrative gets a quick answer that should end the conversation.
This is my email philosophy that I have hammered out over the past 14 years working in an office.
Email-work efficiency is a pet project of mine because; one I’ve had a very steep learning curve, and two, I see SO many people with 7803 unread emails in their inbox surfing their emails like it’s their job. THAT’S NOT YOUR JOB! Clean up the emails, clean up your life, and do the work you’re actually supposed to be doing.
How do deal with managers who LOVE email.
Now here is a potential problem – what if your boss/manager/co-workers use email for emergency communication? That’s a problem. Unless your job is ‘emailer’ your primary role at a company is probably some kind of project work. Ask your boss if he’d rather have you 100% focused on emails all day or doing whatever your job description says that you should be doing. It may be a little passive-aggressive so you may need to phrase it more delicately than I did, but deep work IS NOT POSSIBLE if you’re checking an incoming email every few minutes (or even a few times per hour).
In search of a data point, I created a custom folder on outlook and I get about 500 emails per week. If those are sent between 9 am & 5 pm Monday – Friday, that is one email every 12.5 minutes)
Final thought
My process is flawed and is always being improved….if you see a potential improvement or your industry has some quirk where this doesn’t apply let me know, and we can solve our email problems together!