Today was the day. After being engaged no fewer than five times in conversations that began with some version of “hey Rusty, did you get that email I sent you about xyz….?” I finally had to admit that I was officially beyond the point of no return – it was time throw the switch. After my last meeting of the day with the Associate Dean I went to my office and just did it. For way too long I have been suffering under the delusion that my email inbox was too big to fail, that some government agency was going to come in at the eleventh hour and bail me out. Alas, it was not to be. I had to take matters into my own hands. That’s right – I opened up my email, and without looking, deleted everything out of my in box. All 871 messages.

Ugh.

Freedom!

So, if you have emailed me anything in the last couple of weeks to which I have not responded, this post serves as the required public notice that I have officially declared email bankruptcy. If your email was pressing and demands some sort of actionable response, feel free to resend it. But be advised however, I am no longer reading email. I am reverting back to my old strategy (how did I ever get out of the habit in the first place?!?) of processing email instead. What does that mean?

Wait! Before you can implement this strategy, you must commit first to always work off the top of the stack.
Most of us work on the “first in, first out strategy” of task management. In other words, A task comes in, you put it on the top of the stack. When you finish one task, you pull the next one off the bottom of the stack, always making sure that you do everything in the order in which it was received. Seems fair, right? Well, what I have found is that this method of working just leaves everybody waiting an equally really long time for you to get to them, and everybody becomes equally pissed off. Instead, by working off the top of the stack instead of the bottom (getting to work on whatever is the most immediate) you instead get to make someone’s day brighter by getting right back to them immediately. Besides, those folks on the bottom of the pile are already either a) already pissed off or b) already pissed off and they have solved their own problems. Nothing you are going to do is going to brighten their day, so why even try? In the end, if their task is really all that important, they will make sure they get back on top of the stack in a hurry anyway.

Processing eMail
This is pretty easy in concept, but admittedly a little difficult to maintain. I successfully implemented this strategy a couple of years ago for a while after watching the most excellent presentation that Merlin Mann gave as a “Google Tech Talk”  way back in July, 2007. You can watch the video yourself (warning: it is an hour long) or simply skip down and follow the 5 simple rules, or “processing actions.”

Inbox Zero
“What action can I have to take with regard to this email?”

1. Delete. Or at least archive. The first action is often the hardest, but the one that you should do the most. Read an email once (and only once) and decide immediately if it is actionable. if it is not, then delete it, or archive it. Most importantly, remember that every email does not need a response. And honesty is the best policy here. You know in your heart-of-hearts you are not going to respond to that email. So just delete it already! More importantly, don’t even think about developing some complex filing system – the search function in your email has become way too good not to use. I have one folder called “Archive.” I can always do a simple search to find whatever I need, whenever I need it.
2. Delegate. And then follow up. that is right. It is not always your responsibility to do everything – a lot of times you can simply forward the email on to the folks that really need to act on it. When I do this I like to leave myself a “tickler” in my calendar (with the email attached) that reminds me to check at some point in the future that it was indeed acted on by others.
3. Respond. In five sentences. or less. period. And if you don’t have enough information to respond, then ask a question. Tag – you’re it.
4. Defer. Each day I get a number of deceivingly simple one sentence emails that require me to perform hours and sometimes days of work. These are most often the really important ones that encompass the stuff that we are actually paid to do. They just demand too much time to process in the few minutes that I actually have at the moment. This is important: Clear it from your inbox. Put it in a “to do” folder. Mine is called “Maybe Someday…” And before filing them away I usually attach them to my action list that I can adjust and reorder as priorities change. This list (instead of my inbox) becomes the stack from which I work. I find this effective because it also includes all sorts of tasks that are not even email related.
5. Do. If there is something that you can do, well, then just do it, and get rid of the email. Now.

Ultimately the only way any of this can really work is if you turn off your email auto checker. Admittedly tough for me. It is almost Pavlovian. Out of the box my email client checks for email every minute. That is potentially 2,400 interruptions in a 40 hour work week. I will try to set aside some time  each day process email – we will see how that goes.

In the end my inbox will no longer be a to do list or a task manager. My inbox will only be for unread email. I promise. Or I can just declare bankruptcy again. It was actually kind of fun!