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.

One small note before we begin: all of the features I’m going to refer to below are features that exist in the two most common email clients: Gmail and Outlook. These clients share the same names for these features, except for two.

1. When I use the term “folder”, it is referring to the Outlook “folder” feature and the Gmail “label” feature.

2. When I use the term “format”, it is referring to the Outlook “conditional formatting” feature that allows the email previews in your inbox to use different fonts and colors based on rules. For Gmail, you can approximate this functionality by using the “label” feature and assigning colors to that label (you can’t change the font).

Step 1 - Your inbox is outside your Triage Shield

You need to have the same a-ha moment as I did. This may take a second, or it may take longer. You need to stop seeing your inbox as a work item list. It is a stream of inputs that you have to triage to decide what is your work and what isn’t. Your inbox is outside your Triage Shield. That means it is completely distinct from your own work management system. 99% of email users manage at least some of their work out of their inbox. Break out of this default mode of operation, and sanity awaits.

Repeat this as many times as you need to until it clicks: my inbox is my triage room. Keep repeating this to yourself until you genuinely believe it. When you get there, you’re ready to move on to step 2.

Step 2 - Assess your level of resistance

You want be fully aware of what you’re getting into before you get started. With eyes wide open, seeing what level of resistance you are most likely to face, you will be better prepared to power through this resistance.

Compute your resistance factor by dividing the total number of items currently in your inbox by the number of items in your inbox that are not more than seven days old. So if your inbox has 2,500 items in it, and 300 of those are from the last week, then your resistance factor is 2,500 / 300 = 8.3. The higher this number, the more excuses you’re going to manufacture as you try to work through the process I am detailing here.

Resistance Factor: 0 - 5

You’re starting from a really good place. This triage process should be easy for you to adopt. Internal resistance should be minimal.

Resistance Factor: 5 - 10

You’ve been trying to manage your email, but you can’t get to the point of feeling on top of it. You ebb and flow between periods of higher email maintenance and periods of lower maintenance.

• Most likely resistance: “I’ve tried to tame this many times in the past and have never gotten it to stick. Why should this attempt be any different?”

• Response: This process is complete, precise, and repeatable. But most importantly, it includes the “triage room” epiphany that I bet your previous attempts never had.

Resistance Factor: 10 - 50

You haven’t had much luck making any email management system stick.

• Most likely resistance: “Don’t bother. It’s impossible to stay on top of your email. Furthermore, it’s a fool’s errand.”

• Response: Communication is vital. Being responsive to the signal⁶ increases people’s ability to depend on you, earning you more trust, which sets you up for increased scope of impact.

Resistance Factor: 50+

You have over a year’s worth of email collected in your inbox. This creates an incredible amount of inertia. You’re probably having a hard time even seeing this as a problem, based on how established your current habit is.

• Most likely resistance: “What’s the point of changing anything? My system is working perfectly.”

• Response: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” Set up an app timer that tracks how much time you spend in your email client. Do that for a week and then see what the average time you spend per day on email is. This might help you see the time opportunity in changing your ways. And if that time is low, indicating that you’ve simply given up on trying to keep up with email, then do a more reflective exercise and think about what important opportunities you’ve missed by not being part of certain conversations.

• Second most likely resistance: “I have so much valuable information in my inbox. There’s no way I could throw all of that information away.”

• Response: I agree. The person who is transitioning from “my inbox has everything” to “my inbox is my triage room” will start out with all sorts of gems buried deep in their inbox. And they have gotten value out of being able to search and find any of these gems at a moment’s notice. This process will still allow for all of that. Since email client searches work across all your folders, it will find everything. You’ll find out how in step 4.

Step 3 - Block time off on your calendar

There is an up-front investment to setting this system up. And then, as you tune your process, the time spent will drop accordingly. Here is what the total investment looks like:

• Week 1 (7.5hrs total) - 1hr for the one time set up (steps 4-8), then daily: 1hr at start of day, 15min midday, and 15min at end of day

• Week 2 (5hrs total) - daily: 30min at start of day, 15min midday, and 15min at end of day

• Week 3+ (3.75hrs total) - daily: 15min at start of day, 15min midday, and 15min at end of day

Show your commitment to following through with this process by setting up recurring meetings for the time blocks outlined above. I think there is value in kicking this process off on a Monday, as it will make it easy to check the amount of progress each Friday.

Step 4 - Declare email bankruptcy

When you officially declare financial bankruptcy, it stays on your record for 7-10 years. So you can’t just declare bankruptcy repeatedly. This means you have to be careful about when you declare it, and you have to have a plan in place for not having to redeclare it. It is the same with email bankruptcy. You should not declare bankruptcy until you are ready to commit to a new approach to email management. This step is your point of no return. Are you ready?

Create a folder named “Email Bankruptcy <date>”. Move all inbox items more than a week old into this newly created folder. As you do this, tell yourself, “This is the one and only time I am declaring bankruptcy.” Recognize the significance of this moment.

Now all of your older email is out of sight, out of mind. Searching in your email client will still find items from this Email Bankruptcy folder. So you have nothing to fear.

You now have one week’s worth of email as your sample set to work on for the remaining steps.

Step 5 - Establish rules based on sender trends

Use filter rules to pre-triage your email. Here you will look for trends in your inbox and setup rules that will automatically act on these trends before you ever have to triage them. The rules you create in steps 5 and 6 are just the first pass based on the sample set of emails you have. Keep in mind that as you progressively tune this process over time, you are certain to discover additional trends that can be pre-triaged by setting up additional rules.

Sort your inbox by sender. For senders that have sent multiple emails, ask the following questions:

1. Are these notification emails that I no longer want to receive? Unsubscribe. If they’re coming from an app, go to the app and tune the notifications (e.g. in Strava, I don’t want to know about people giving me kudos, but if someone comments on an activity, then I’d like to be notified of it so that I can respond). If there isn’t a way to unsubscribe , then set up a filter rule to auto-delete. Then you can Delete all of those notification emails from your inbox.

2. Are these notification emails that I don’t ever need to read in the moment, but rather need to potentially access it later? One engineering example of this is successful build notifications. This is where you set up a filter rule to automatically move this email to a folder. Create the folder if you haven’t already, then create the rule. Once created, one the rule immediately to Move all those notifications emails out of your inbox.

Step 6 - Establish rules based on title trends

Sort by title. Look for groups of standard title formats (titles won’t always be the same, but will follows the same pattern), then ask the same two above questions for each title group.

Now you can return to default sort order, which is sorted by time, most recent to least recent.

Step 7 - Create “Accept As Work” shortcut

Create a shortcut that will take any email and move it into the Actions section of your work management system. If you’re using Outlook for your email and OneNote for your Work Management System, then this is all built-in functionality through the “Send to OneNote” context menu item in Outlook. For any other email client, there will most likely be a plug-in that your note management software provides to give you this functionality.

Step 8 - Create formattings

To help you spot more important items in your inbox, create formattings for the following email categories:

1. Email sent just to me - I use a larger font, italicized, and red

2. Email sent from any of my direct or indirect reports - I use blue

3. Email sent from any of my management chain - I use purple

Your one-time triage setup is now complete. You have the starter set of rules, actions, and formattings in place. This should have taken you about an hour to do. Now take a break and return to this process when you’re ready to spend another hour on a methodical first triage pass.

Step 9 - First triage pass

Your inbox now has the kinds of emails you will typically be managing as part of your triage process. It is just 21 times the normal volume (the math for “21 times” is based on your inbox now having seven days’ worth of email, and you will typically only have to deal with 1/3 of a day at a time). And this is the first time you’re doing this triage pass. So don’t worry about getting through your entire inbox in this initial pass. Set your timer for one hour and get to work.

Start at the top of your inbox. For each email, If it can be read in less than 30 seconds, read it entirely. If it’s long, read enough of it to be able to form an opinion. Then make one of the following triage decisions:

1. Strictly Informative - no action required, and containing no information that you will want to reference later. Delete.

2. Worth Remembering - no action required, but containing information that you may want to refer back to. Move to appropriate reference folder, or Archive (which will not delete it, but will remove it from you inbox … so it is still searchable, just like your Email Bankruptcy folder)

3. Deeper read needed - if this is a longer email that you were only able to skim in your triage, but you’ve determined you need to fully read and digest, then use your Accept As Work shortcut to copy this item to the Actions section of your work management system. Then Delete this item from your inbox.

4. Quick Reply needed - if it needs a reply that will take you less than two minutes to do, then Reply right now. Then either Delete or Archive.

5. More involved reply needed - if it needs a longer reply, use your Accept As Work shortcut to copy this item to the Actions section of your work management system. Then Delete this item it from your inbox.

6. Accept work - this email is requesting work from you, and you accept that request. Reply that you have accepted this work request, provide an ETA if you can, and then use your Accept As Work shortcut to copy your reply (your reply will have more context than the original email, and will also be the better email to respond to when you later complete this item and want to notify the requestors that you did) to the Actions section of your work management system. Then Delete this item from your inbox.

Step 10 - Repeat indefinitely

The above process is what you will repeat three times a day, shrinking the time needed on each iteration as you (a) identify more trends and construct more rules, (b) get better at decision making, and (c) opportunistically identify additional common actions that you can build custom shortcuts for.

Practice makes better. Practice makes faster.

Stay on top of your inbox, and never be buried by it.

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Footnotes

1. Revving Your Energy Flywheel

2. Triage Shield

3. External Brain

4. A World Without Email, Cal Newport (Goodreads)

5. Timebox Everything and Finite Time

6. Propagate the Signal, Not the Noise