In a word? No.
Same thing goes for email.
You will never be done with email. Someone will always want to ask you to do something. Someone will always want you to get back to them about something. Someone will always be in your inbox, waiting for you to respond yesterday.
So, given all this, how do we go about managing it? How do we acknowledge that it is necessary to do deals, write books, and communicate with communicators, but keep it from getting in the way of creation? Specifically, how do we figure out a productive system to best respond to emails?
First, I believe that 95 percent of the time email does not require the same level of energy as our other projects do. And so I agree with folks who say that you should never email first thing in the morning. Instead, with those first few hours of peak energy that most of us have before decision fatigue sets in, we should focus on our most difficult task of the day, and get that done. This is not a new idea, and it appears in many other books on productivity. Although there are always exceptions—writer Gretchen Rubin, for example, likes starting her days with an hour of email and social media because she finds it energizing—for the vast majority of people email is an energy suck, and should not be the first thing you do when you sit down at your desk.
That said, telling you when not to email isn’t suggesting when you should respond to emails. So when is it best to respond to emails, if not in the first few hours of the morning when you first turn on your computer?
I believe there are a few key times when it’s best to do real emailing. And by “real emailing” I mean when you spend a chunk of time devoted to working through a bunch of emails, and not when you send a one-off urgent response to something from your iPhone or from your computer while you’re typing furiously in a Word document to meet a deadline in another screen.
Here are some email rules to live by:
• As much as possible, email should be done in bulk. There are always exceptions to this rule, but in order to be truly productive you need to slot the bulk of your emailing into specific times of the day—and not too many times! The alternative, which most of us fall into the trap of, is doing our “real” work all day with email perpetually pinging in the background, ready to interrupt our concentration and derail us on a near-constant basis, even for the most minor of queries or cute cat pictures.
• Email should be done when you have less energy, rather than more. Figure out when that is, whenever it is, and create a block of time in your schedule to fit in your emailing in that period. In my experience, the lull in the afternoon is a great time to go through a bunch of non-urgent emails.
I recommend thinking about your email in terms of four categories:
• Urgent
• Daily
• Weekly
• Never
In my email inbox, urgent and daily emails generally come from the same sources, and the response time is simply determined by the degree of urgency I associate with the particular note at hand.
Here is what this category of email is mostly made up of:
Urgent and Daily Emails
• “Live” projects: In the course of a year in your chosen profession, you might have fifteen projects on your plate (just go with this number for this example—your number may be different). In the course of any given month in that year, you might be in some stage of development/analysis with up to six of those individual projects. However, only a few of those will be considered “live” at any given time. These two or three live projects will get top billing in that month—meaning that the majority of your attention will be focused on them. Sure, you might think of and respond to notes about some of the other projects—but it is the “live” ones that you are most attuned to.
• Life-changers: This is a mixed bag. Generally, though, life-changers are some type of make-or-break news (you sold your company! the IRS is auditing you! your mother’s participating in a flash mob!) or opportunity (a significant press opportunity! a president wants to meet you!). You know these when you see them.
• Inner circle emails: We all have one of these circles, and these folks get top billing, even when they are emailing their tenth pregnant stomach shot or stupid animal YouTube clip this week. To be a happy individual connected to friends and family, this is healthy and important (and not unproductive).
Weekly emails
I consider weekly emails to generally be emails that are often about other people’s agendas. Typically, these are queries from people who want things I may or may not be able to give that are not considered urgent, and do not fall into any set of my real priorities. These are emails I do want to respond to, but should not do on a daily basis if I hope to get my own work done.
Never Emails
We all know what these are, and have different standards for what these may be. I believe that email can become even more challenging when you face a regular stream of unsolicited emails. These are emails from folks you don’t know who want things, want to tell you things, want to ask you things, or want to yell at you about things (see more on that last one below).
As someone with an active online life and a popular blog, I get a lot of these unsolicited emails. And, for years, I tried hard to respond to many of the ones I get.
But there was always one type of email I tried to never respond to. I called it the Toxic I Hate You Email.
Is there an email sitting in your inbox that screams at you for something you likely never did? An email that bashes you for something someone read about you that isn’t even true? An email that makes inaccurate assumptions about your life and then cuts you down for them?
My advice: just don’t respond. It’s not worth your time.
In 2006, when I first started a blog, and random people online who didn’t know me were able to contact me for the first time in my life, I started learning this lesson. Years later, I’m still at it. I’m not perfect, and I mess up. Just this month, I responded to one because it was so appallingly offensive. The result? I started an idiotic chain of toxic emails that took up my headspace for a few of my short hours on this planet.
Was it stupid? Highly. Did I regret it? Very much so. How did it end? I stopped responding and put a filter in Gmail to immediately trash all future emails from the person. (If I didn’t do this, I knew I’d be tempted to keep at it!)
The lesson is simple. Get an insanely negative email in your inbox from someone you don’t know about something you’re not responsible for? Don’t answer. Unless you want to feed a troll. Then go ahead and respond. Spend your energy trying to convince someone of something they’ll never be convinced of. Start an email war. But I don’t recommend it.
What do I recommend?
Think boundaries, and don’t invite crazy in.
An Email System That Works
• Check your email daily to deal with urgent and daily emails.
• Every week, calendar aside time to deal with weekly emails in one fell, focused swoop.
• Never deal with never emails.
MEETINGS
People who have worked with me know how much I dislike meetings, and how I’ve made something of a study of figuring out why our meeting culture is so broken. When the reality is that we spend 35–50 percent of our work lives in meetings, though, I don’t think I’m very controversial in saying there is a problem. Obviously, some meetings need to happen. But the notion that we need so many of them—with so many participants!—to successfully run our work lives is absolutely preposterous. Here are the critical ways to change the way you think about meetings, reduce the meetings you lead and attend, and make meetings more meaningful when you are there.
Use Email When You Can
The key to avoiding many unnecessary meetings is to do things in writing when you can. Especially these days, when seamless chat tools like Basecamp and Slack and Google Chat exist to make back-and-forth exchanges even more instantaneous than a regular email client, written communication is often infinitely faster in
reaching certain goals than having a meeting. There is nothing more frustrating than multiple back-and-forth exchanges to schedule a meeting, then cancel a meeting, then reschedule a meeting, only to finally have it and find out the other person had a quick three-minute question! Although no one thinks they want more email, in terms of time efficiency, email often wins.
Use an Efficient Way to Schedule Meetings
If you do your own scheduling, you know that the least efficient thing you can do is to email back and forth with someone about good times that you can connect. Instead, use a tool to help. If the others you’re going to meet with are in your organization, encouraging everyone to keep their calendars updated makes this step irrelevant. If they aren’t in your organization or you don’t have access to their calendars, try a tool like Calendly.
Block Your Meetings
Remember to block schedule your meetings just as you block schedule other activities in your work life. If you are an introvert, like me, this also helps to deal with the fatigue that comes as the result of meetings.
Allow Buffer Time
This is especially critical if you schedule meetings using the block scheduling technique. Scheduling things back-to-back with no buffer is a recipe for chronic tardiness and stress. Instead, make sure to keep a small buffer between meetings to ensure you’ll show up at the next one on time.
Schedule Meetings for the Amount of Time They Really Take
A great way to allow buffer time is also a great tip on its own: don’t schedule meetings for the preset thirty- and sixty-minute time slots that appear in your calendar system. People are much more likely to stay on the conference line for a full thirty minutes if it’s been scheduled as such, even when they’re done with the agenda after twenty. Instead, schedule meetings for the length of time you really need to get things done.
Be Clear if There Is an Agenda
As we have become more aware of some of the problems with meetings in corporate America, the idea that all meetings require an agenda has become a part of popular wisdom. In contrast, I do believe that some meetings simply do not have an agenda, and that’s okay. Sometimes people just want to connect, which is important to maintain healthy relationships. In terms of time efficiency, though, it is important to schedule that catch-up, and not just have it spontaneously uproot your schedule and cause you to miss out on another activity you had blocked. Be up-front about its purpose, and you’ll save your schedule.
Have an Agenda
The vast majority of meetings do require an agenda, and this is an important step in keeping things on track and on time. Work hard to create simple, clear agendas that everyone can follow. If other people need to prepare something, send the agenda ahead of time so that they can come with what is expected from them.
Be Careful of Standing Meetings
Oftentimes standing meetings (every week, or twice a week, say) are very necessary, and in my past I have regularly held standing meetings with bosses and with direct reports. The challenge is to make sure you aren’t holding standing meetings on principle, and that you’re doing it because it’s truly needed. A great tip to reduce time spent on scheduling is to set up a weekly meeting with someone you think you might need to talk to two or three times a month, and then simply state that if it’s not needed you will cancel a certain number of days (and not hours!) before.
Prepare When You Need to
If you are invited to a meeting and need to prepare, do so. This allows you to give your best effort to the other participants and sets the precedent for what you expect from others.
Only Go to Meetings Where You’re Really Needed
If you work in a large organization, you likely have seen the number of meetings folks invite you to increase linearly with the number of years you’ve been at the company and the number of employees hired. Nip this in the bud and directly ask organizers to remove you from meetings that you aren’t adding value to—or that fifteen other people can handle on their own.
Learn Positive Multitasking
The world is down on multitasking, and articles everywhere claim its demise: Multitasking doesn’t work. Mono-tasking is the new multitasking. Do more than one thing at a time and you’re doing nothing at all.
I agree that multitasking as we know it is broken. That said, I believe there is one type of multitasking that does reliably work.
As I’ve said before, I read a lot. And although this has always been true, it was the year that I discovered the power of positive multitasking that I really upped my reading goals. I did it through a little thing called audiobooks.
When I first read that combining “brainless” physical activities with mental activities is a great way to get more done, I realized that I was already doing this in my regular life, and that it was really a version of positive multitasking. I talked on the phone while cooking the tomato sauce I’d made a thousand times. I knitted while watching TV. And I listened to audiobooks while doing, well, anything.
When I first started talking about how listening to audiobooks had increased my reading goals on my blog, my friend Amalia responded in the comments:
When do you listen to these? I can’t think of any time except exercise when I wouldn’t just whip out a book/kindle instead? I’m intrigued.
Especially considering the fact that audiobooks often take longer than reading for most people (you likely read faster than you listen), this was a good question. After all, why bother to listen to an audiobook if you can read it faster, right? Wrong.
The benefit of an audiobook is that it enables positive multitasking, and not just when exercising. Here is when I find time to listen to audiobooks, and when you can do so (or do any other of your brain-“full” activities).
1. While Exercising: I’m a huge fan of listening to an audiobook while running or working out. If you want to read and work out at the same time, you have to find a stationary bike (or subject your treadmill to Kindle-induced nausea), but with an audiobook you can be doing anything.
2. When in Transit: Driving, taking public transport, or walking anywhere (through the grocery store, through an airport) are all easy times to listen to audiobooks when you wouldn’t otherwise be able to read, and when most folks listen to music or nothing at all.
3. While Eating: Although you can read books while eating, it’s never quite ideal. In contrast, listening to audiobooks is the perfect complement.
4. While Doing Other Brainless Tasks: Unloading the dishwasher? Cooking something you’ve made a thousand times? Putting on makeup? Nursing (sorry guys)? A perfect time to listen to an audiobook. Don’t worry about putting on the headphones, just let your iPhone or other device play it on speaker. I do this all the time, and love the content I’m able to consume in an otherwise “down” moment.
As you might have guessed, many of the tips above don’t only work with audiobooks. In fact, they work with all kinds of other brain-needy tasks as well. Inventor Nilofer Merchant is one of many innovators who has jumped on the bandwagon of walking meetings—taking meetings with coworkers while walking around the park, or up a mountain. This isn’t a strategy that works only if your coworkers are up for the exercise, though. Having a walking meeting (or a walking call with a friend, family member, or friendly American Airlines representative) over the phone is a smart multitasking move, and has become even more common with the advent of treadmill desks. Bestselling author A. J. Jacobs is one of many people I know now using treadmill desks—and swearing by them.
Just be careful not to pant. During my long marathon training runs I was known for calling friends and family members to chat. One day, twenty minutes into a call, my friend Court asked, “Are you panting?” I confessed.
Remember the basics: positive multitasking combines a truly brainless activity with a brain-“full” activity. Or, said another way, a mental activity with a physical one.
FIND YOUR OASIS
In 2012, when I was working at Twitter, I went to both the Democratic and Republican
national conventions. They were both crazy big events that involved nonstop meetings, long nights, and terrible fast food.
But then there was this thing called the Oasis.
The Oasis was the best thing that happened to me in those two weeks. It was Arianna Huffington’s attempt to bring peace to the crazy, and boy did it work.
When I arrived in Tampa, I heard mention of this supposed hub of well-being and mindfulness. A place where anyone could go—free—and find peace and calm and books and food and—did I mention?—calm. As the whispers of other convention-goers became impossible to ignore, I knew I had to see it for myself. When I entered into the white-walled space from the Florida heat the first day, I already had high expectations.
Within five minutes, all such expectations were blown out of the water. It turns out that eating a lovely, healthy meal, perusing good books for your body and soul, and watching (and participating) in the yoga and meditation classes in session all around me were exactly the fuel I needed. The Oasis became my oasis at both conventions, and since that time, whenever I have found myself in a sterile conference space with thousands of other folks listening to the tenth speaker of the day, I long for such a special experience.
But the reality is that most busy events and busy days don’t have an Oasis like the ones Huffington’s team set up in Tampa or Charlotte that year. So it’s important that we work to create them in the midst of our regular lives.
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