Team Alpha 375

"When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't

adjust the goal, adjust the action steps."
--Confucius

E-mail Overwhelm Can Be Cured By Michael Linenberger

I am sure you often experience "in-box stress"--that sinking feeling you have when you glance at your overloaded in‑box. When weeks or even months of unread e-mail and incomplete actions build up in your in-box, it can make you may feel lousy. You may feel like you are mismanaging your work. You may feel guilty and neglectful. But most of all, you feel overwhelmed.

E-mail overwhelm is such a common experience these days. We all get way more e-mail than we can fully act on, and so the in-box gets bigger and bigger--it quickly spins out of control.

Well, there's good news--in-box stress can be cured. There are simple steps you can take to get back control of your in-box, and at the same time, become much more effective at work.

E-mail Can Make Us Work Harder

When e‑mail was first invented, it was supposed to improve work--but unfortunately, e-mail is actually making us work harder. And I am not just referring to the time it takes to read or respond to e‑mail. Rather, the real reason e‑mail makes us work harder is that it leads to many more business interactions per day--far more than we could have with only live phone calls or in-person meetings. Both of those are limited by the hours in the day, but the e‑mail in-box knows no such limits.

That's bad news because business interactions almost always lead to required action. Think about it. If someone sends you a business e‑mail these days--Tag, you're it. "I sent you an e‑mail on this. Didn't you read it?" You are now on notice, either to process the information, or, more commonly, to take some additional action. You can get hundreds of these per week, and they quickly build up.

Wouldn't it help if we could somehow just filter out our useless e-mail so we don't need to read it? Well, even if we could do that, that's not the real problem. The real problem is not with reading e‑mail but rather with doing e‑mail. Reading spam or unneeded cc'd mail (colleague spam) is not what bogs down our ability to get through the in-box. It's the relevant e‑mail that bogs us down. Reacting to meaningful e‑mail with potential actions for us to do makes us skid off track--it kills a huge chunk of our day! The trouble is that we don't have a natural way to prioritize our reactions to mail like this; instead we try to do it all--we try to act on all e-mail as it comes in--fearing it will scroll off the bottom and be lost. Not only can we not keep up that way, but then our important work does not get done; so both our in-box and workday spin out of control.

The Solution

First, instead of reading messages as they come in, read them periodically, no more often than every hour or two--in other words, read a batch of e-mails at a time. Research shows that it takes several minutes to recover from each work interruption, and that's what scattered e‑mail reading leads to. I also recommend you turn off the e‑mail notifications that encourage you to jump on incoming mail--Microsoft Outlook's blue notification box is especially distracting, so make sure to disable that beast.

But the main solution is to create a new habit, and the habit is this: don't take significant actions on e‑mails when you first read them (unless truly urgent). Instead, put those actions on your to-do list. Find an effective to-do or task system that you can prioritize tasks within, and use it for all your tasks--especially for e-mail delivered ones.

If you use Microsoft Outlook, this is particularly simple, as that software includes easy ways to convert e-mails to Outlook tasks; and tasks are managed easily in Outlook's task system, once you learn how to use it. E-mails converted to tasks in Outlook even include the text and attachments from the e‑mail--you'll never need to search for the original e-mail. Other e-mail packages have similar capabilities.

If you use a paper list you are also covered; just quickly jot an entry on your list for any e-mail delivered actions.

No matter what kind of to-do list you use, as you enter tasks from e-mail, prioritize and date them--you are then free to continue to read or scan to the bottom of your new e-mail, adding more tasks if needed. After all your new e-mail is processed, only then work tasks off your to-do list in priority order. The idea is to treat actions in e‑mail like any other tasks, only working the most important first. That way your e-mail doesn't rule you--you rule your e-mail.

The End of In-box Stress

This process of converting action-laden e-mails to tasks is an important and powerful practice. If you follow the principles above, you will speed through your mail by spending only a few seconds converting each action e‑mail into prioritized a task and then moving on. Since you are not bogged down doing e-mail actions prematurely, you'll get through your e-mail much faster. You will, perhaps for the first time, process all your new mail in one sitting.
Conversion to tasks also stops e-mail from hijacking your workday. Instead of working low priority actions simply because they are at the top of your in-box, you allow the priorities you set on your single to-do list to rule your action choices. As a result, the most important tasks get completed first and only the lower priority items fall off at the end of the day.

And conversion to tasks removes the tension from your in-box since with e-mail tasks all identified and managed, you can now more easily file and empty your in-box. You no longer need to save all e‑mail in your in-box to search for required actions later--your task list holds those actions. I teach all my clients to completely empty their in-box every day using this approach, and it works!

So, imagine the freedom and relief of having an empty in-box--a feeling that your chaos and overwhelm is under control. Without in-box stress, you'll have more time and energy to get your important work done and maybe to even enjoy your workday for a change.