Taming Your Email: Tips from Productivity Guru David Allen
by David Allen
 David
Allen is an international author and lecturer. He is the
founder and President of the David Allen Company, a management
consulting, coaching, and training firm. He is the author
of the best-selling book, Getting
Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
In his article, Allen shows us some handy
tips for taming the email tiger.
* * * * *
A big challenge these days for the more "wired"
of us is how to organize and manage the flood of email messages
that we need to handle on a daily basis. My clients range
from the "just getting started" to execs at Microsoft
and Oracle, with 300+ emails a day, non-stop.
In one respect, email is no different than
an in-basket or an answering machine-it's just a collection
box for communication that needs to be assessed, processed,
and organized as appropriate. But in many ways, email is
suffering from the same challenges as a low-tech in-basket--too
much stuff that we don't have the time or inclination to
process and organize as it comes in. So it becomes the swampish
breeding ground of "staged" items-read but not
decided upon. (I have uncovered as many as 5,000 emails
still festering in a client's "in" mail.)
If your volume and processing speed leave
you consistently with less than one screen-full of emails
at any one time, you're probably still within the alive,
conscious, and sane range. If you have more than that, you're
dangerously subject to stress and numb-out relative to the
new and exciting electronic/digital Valhalla.
TIPS
Create a sufficient archive file folder
library within your email program so you can rapidly
drag emails that you just want to save for future reference
into those folders. Purge them at least yearly to keep them
conscious and give you the freedom to keep anything that
strikes your fancy.
Hold to the 2-minute rule: Read and
respond, delete or file emails that can be dispatched in
2 minutes or less. This is a powerful habit, and more so
as your volume of email grows.
Create actionable folders for emails that
require more than 2 minutes of focus, and make them visually
distinct from your reference folders. If your email program
shows your folders alphabetically (as MS Mail), then create
at least: @Action and @Waiting For.
The "@" sign will put them at the
top of your folder list (so you are reminded that they are
different from just reference, and that you need to look
at them regularly). Then you have to decide:
1. Will I use the contents of the folder itself to remind
me that I need to do something with/about that email? Or
2. Will I record the action of responding to that email
in my organization system?
If (1), then you'd better open that folder
at least once every day, so you do not let anything slip.
If (2), you have the extra task of tracking the action item
in your system, but you don't need to review the email folder--you
just have it there if you need the original email for future
replies.
If you delegate a lot of items by email,
then you will want to create copies of those emails and
store them for review in your @Waiting For folder. Unfortunately,
most of the major email programs require that you blind
copy yourself (bcc) on those emails and then as they pop
back into your email in-basket, you can drag that into your
Waiting For folder.
If you are trustworthy in using your email
program as a working reminder tool of what you still
need to do or finish, then you might want to get more discreet
in some categories of actionable emails. For example: @Read/Review
is a good category folder for those emails that you've been
cc'd on, are more than a 2-minute read, or that you're pretty
sure you don't have to do anything about, you just want
to read--Good stuff for reading while waiting for meetings
to start.
The tips above are a starting point for devising
a system for taming your email. Experiment with various
combinations to find what works for you.
Find out more about David Allen at www.davidco.com.
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