Managing Email

Your inbox is your triage room, not a parking lot

In my M2 (manager of managers) role at Microsoft, my inbox was getting 300 - 400 new emails a day. And with the many demands on my time, it was a challenge to stay on top of my inbox. Despite spending 11 hours in the office, I would still bring my laptop home to get another 30min of “quiet time” to go through more of my inbox.

Gamification is an approach I have used in many other aspects of my work to inject energy¹ into the process and accelerate my output. So I took a gamification approach with my inbox, partnering with a colleague of mine, Jevan, to see who could do better at staying on top of their email. We would compare notes as we went, on a quest for the “under control inbox.” Email filter rules, custom shortcuts, and add-ins were all weapons we used. And we made significant progress. But even with all of our tuning, our inboxes were only staying manageable for brief periods of time. There was something fundamental missing.

Your inbox is your triage room, not your work item list. Once I internalized these words, a light bulb turned on in my head. This was the vital final piece of the puzzle. Taking all the tuning Jevan and I had figured out, and applying this simple but significant shift in perspective, I instantly wrangled my inbox. My inbox was completely drained … to zero … three times a day: 7:15am, 12:15pm, and 5:15pm. With a daily time investment of less than 45 minutes, I could remain on top of my email, keep all conversations moving forward, and never be the bottleneck. And, bonus, never take my laptop home at night!

This post is the follow-up to my Triage Shield² post from last week. Today is a deep dive into the triage process for the email input. This triage process is how you intentionally select which emails become work in your system, recorded in the work management system of your External Brain³.

Why Bother?

Communication is the oxygen of an organization. It is fundamental. You need to build your communication strategy, and you need to continue to develop your efficiency with your communication. It is critical that you are responsive, to your team, your partners, and your customers.

The nearly universal problem with being responsive is the non-stop deluge of email that people receive. There’s an excellent book on this topic by Cal Newport called “A World Without Email”⁴. There he describes many viable ways to mitigate the volume of communication that occurs over email. I will dive into that topic in a later post. But for now, I want to accept this reality, and show you, step by step, how you can overcome the deluge while maintaining your sanity, and do this in a very timeboxed⁵ fashion.