7 Reasons to Live in Your Calendar and Only Visit Your Inbox Occasionally
Do you find that email is central to almost everything you do in your role? Is it something you use all day, every day? Is it now the main method of receiving and managing your workload?
As a result, most of us have now developed a working style that has become increasingly inbox-based, interruption-driven, distracted and reactive.
This working style often leads to;
constantly scrolling up and down to find the email that needs your attention now
re-reading the same email multiple times before you take action on it
feeling overwhelmed with trying to keep track of everything that needs to be done
worry about missing something important
having a nagging sense of anxiety or even stress about your inbox
Here are 7 ways or reasons to live in your calendar (instead of the inbox) throughout each workday and only visit your inbox a few times a day. This will help shift your working style to something that becomes more calendar-based, plan-driven, focused and proactive.
Make the Calendar your default setting so that when your software opens at the start of the day, it opens to the Calendar rather than to the inbox. You only need visit the inbox as often as needed during the day according to your role - some people are in roles where they need to respond to email once or even twice per hour, while others can check it only once or twice a day.
The key is to address email in a structured rather than unstructured way, giving it full attention rather than partial attention and being proactive rather than reactive to email and the tasks it delivers.
Whatever frequency you choose to visit the inbox, you can turn off all the email alerts so that these are not distracting. Getting control of WHEN you check email is the #1 strategy for being able to manage information overload in general and email overload in particular. Email alerts have a profoundly negative impact on workplace productivity and are a major cause of multi-tasking. But multi-tasking is a myth. It’s a concept for computers not for humans.
When in Calendar view, Outlook users can right click on the 'mail' or envelope icon and select 'open in new window'. This opens the inbox in a new, separate window, in addition to the calendar. When you finish addressing email, close the window. This is better than switching from Calendar to Inbox - when we do it that way, we rarely go back to the calendar and find that we are now we're living in the inbox and only occasionally visiting the calendar. The aim is to open the inbox in a new window, make decisions about newly arrived email and then close the mailbox - you're just visiting, you're not staying!
Move relevant emails and attachments out of the inbox into an existing appointment or task in your calendar. This way, everything you need is where you need to be for when you need access to it. This is much better than opening up a calendar item and then having to hunt through your mailbox to find the various relevant emails and attachments that relate to it. Once an email (and any relevant attachments) have been copies to a Calendar item, the email can be filed or deleted – the working version is where you need for when you need to work on it.
Convert tasks and appointments that arrive in the inbox into your Calendar. Any work that turns up via email will take a period of time to action. Rather than leave these email in the inbox, convert them into a calendar appointment. This makes you think about;
How long will this task take? It's good to think about this more often - most us serially underestimate how long it takes to accomplish tasks. The more often we do this bit of thinking, the more accurate we get and the quicker we are able to make those estimates.
When have I got time? Check your calendar to see what days and times are available for this task, in amongst all the other tasks, appointments and commitments that you have already made, often as a result of email that arrived yesterday or last week! This allows you to more easily decide on when you will tackle the task in context with all the other appointments, tasks and commitments as you can everything in the Calendar.
Which would be the best of the available times? Choose an appropriate day and time for the new task that integrates with all the other appointments, tasks and commitments that are already in your schedule. This way, you'll make more a realistic assessment of when you can actually do this piece of work. If necessary, you can then reply to the sender to give them a timeframe you expect to accomplish the task or to let them know if there will be a delay.
Reply to the original email from within your calendar, there's no need to go back to the mailbox! Often a task that arrives via email requires you to complete some work and then reply to that email. You can do this from within the calendar appointment, as a reply or forward.
What's more, this eliminates the need to keep the original email in the mailbox at all - the most up to date version of the email conversation is the email you send from your calendar, which now goes into your sent items folder in the mailbox. This avoids having multiple copies of the same message as it goes back n' forth - just keep the most recent version which has all the conversation history.
Living in the calendar allows you to single-task rather than multi-task. When you're living in the inbox, there's a constant steam of incoming messages which interrupt and distract you - it's hard to focus on one thing at a time. As a result, you will tend to get caught up multi-tasking a range of actions. But a host of research now shows that multi-tasking, while giving a rush of adrenaline and dopamine that makes us feel good, is actually highly ineffective and unproductive.
When you're working on an email related task in the calendar, you can stay focused and 'single-minded' (cool, calm, collected) - you are much more likely to finish the task quicker and with better outcomes when working in your calendar, away from the distractions of the inbox.
In summary, living in the calendar helps you to be plan or scheduled driven and proactive, rather than interruption-driven and reactive in the way that you work.
Sure, we all need to keep up with our email and we should visit the inbox as often as needed each day according to our role (or the sort of day that we're having). But it should be just a short visit to check on new, incoming messages, make a decision on the next action required for each message (using the proven 4D method) and then return to our scheduled work as defined in our calendar.
Not only is this a more productive basis for work, it's also more satisfying, less pressured and less stressful.
You can read the full White Paper version on this topic at www.steuartsnooks.com.au/resources
Steuart Snooks is a leading E-mail & Workplace Productivity Expert and Thought leader. He works with executives and their EAs worldwide to help them get control of their email so they have more time, energy and headspace for higher order priorities, projects and strategy. Clients consistently praise the depth, relevance and practicality of Steuart’s presentations, workshops and coaching. His passion is to help busy professionals restore email to its rightful place as a powerful tool to facilitate improved workplace productivity and effectiveness, rather than a hindrance to it.