Top Three Tips for Managing Email - Tip 1 - Handle Each Email Only Once
One of the biggest challenges we face each day is how to manage our email and the workload it delivers. For most of us, our workflow is centred around ongoing conversations that are fuelled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through various digital communication tools, especially email.
Here are my top 3 tips for managing this aspect of your daily work:
Handle Each Email Only Once
Use the 4D Process
Triage Your Inbox
Tip 1 - Handle Each Email Only Once
Most of us open our inbox to a mountain of read and unread e-mails (sometimes many thousands). We click on individual messages to read what they’re about. Sometimes we reply; sometimes we don't. Sometimes we leave them as read; sometimes we mark them as unread, with the intention of coming back to them later... but often we don’t. And sometimes we flag them ‘cos they need some attention but this just creates a long list of emails staring at us in red text because they are overdue.
Looking at this mountain of e-mail, it's easy to feel overloaded and overwhelmed. It's easy for things to fall between the cracks. It’s easy to waste lots of time for little progress.
You see, it’s not actually the volume of emails you receive that causes overload – it’s reading the same email 3, 5, 10 or more times before taking action on it that creates the overwhelm. Another problem with this is that the first time we read an email, it opens a file in our mind and now we’re trying to keep track of it in the short-term memory part of the brain. This is where we hold all the unfinished, incomplete and undecided things that are happening in our life.
As a result of this, it uses up a lot of RAM (random access memory) in our mind which then limits our capacity to focus and think clearly. As David Allen, famous for his Getting Things Done (GTD) philosophy, says; “most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams – they’re constantly distracted and disturbed by their own internal mental overload”.
My own perspective on this is that, with the volume of email and other inputs that each of us handle each day, we need to make a decision to look at each new email only once, because . . .
“your time is too valuable to ever look at an email more than once”.
That’s why we need a consistent, reliable, repeatable process that takes minimal time and energy. One that will capture the results of our thinking and decision making in a system or tool that we can trust to bring it back to our attention at the appropriate time. Once we’ve done that, the mind can let it go, freeing up mental capacity and focus for higher-order thinking, priorities, tasks and projects.
The best way to process new email and inputs in the inbox is using the powerful and proven 4D methodology that so many of the well-known time management and productivity experts have advocated in one form or another over the past 30 years.
Next Step
In the next blog post, I will explain the 4D process.
Learn More
You can learn more about how to handle each email only once (and the 4D process) by joining my FREE Revolutionise Your Inbox Overview & Refresher session on Wed 18 Sep 2024 at 12.30pm AEST.
Click here to see the details and register for the FREE Refresher.
