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Notes from the Road to Better Email Habits

31 March 2015

Allison continued her project to improve her email habits and made a little more progress on learning how to achieve the promise of David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

Tags: allison read, balance, david allen, email, productivity, time management and prioritization

I’m a recovering email hoarder and pile maker. In fact, I’ve come to understand that without daily effort, I will always eventually return to an email inbox that is overwhelming and piles on my desk that could topple over at any time. Accepting this about myself has helped me to begin working on the problem in a more meaningful way.

I first learned about David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, when it was published in 2001. My first big client project was succession planning and leadership development for a construction company in West Virginia. The CEO was an avid reader. He and many of his colleagues in the office and on job sites successfully implemented the system. I remember thinking, “Good for you. I’m glad you’ve found something that works. I could never do what Allen recommends!”

For 10 years I would recommend the book to clients saying that I had trouble with the system, but that I’d seen it work for so many of my clients. It wasn’t until 2012 that I finally admitted I had to come up with a better system for managing email and Allen’s was still the one I’d seen work for so many of my clients. So I dipped my toe in the water and started using his approach to making lists and managing email. You’ll see in this post that it worked pretty well for me even though I knew starting at Chapter 7 was the opposite of what Allen recommended. However, I figured starting somewhere was better than nothing.

In 2013 I was ready to follow more of his advice and get the 10,000 or more emails in my inbox (so embarrassing) under control. I described his advice for processing email in this post. Following his plan helped me to make sure my inbox never exploded beyond 400 emails throughout 2014. This was real progress for me and made me realize I was ready to take another step on my journey. My resolution for 2015 would be to try to achieve the goal of getting my inbox down to zero each time I opened email.

I’ve been working on that goal for the last three months. Earlier this month I almost gave up, but an email from my 11-year old nephew helped to strengthen my resolve. He reminded me that email really is pretty great and he inspired this post about the importance of not giving up on a change experiment too soon.

In the last four weeks, I’ve learned I must focus on this Allen rule first if I want to have a chance of making the whole system work. “I need to do a better job of skimming each email quickly to figure out “What is it?” and to determine if it’s “actionable.” If it’s not actionable, I need to consistently delete it or move it to the someday / maybe list or my reference folder. If it is actionable and will take less than two minutes, then I need to do it. Everything else should get delegated to someone else or deferred to the calendar and next action lists.”

When I follow this rule, it really does make for a more productive and meaningful week of work. When I don’t, my inbox quickly balloons to 80 emails. If I get tired or overwhelmed by too many meetings, I start leaving action items in my inbox rather than putting them on one of these lists:

I’ve realized that there are just some days where I can’t get the inbox down to zero throughout the day and the self-imposed pressure to do so is too draining. Allen would say that “emergency scanning” is a bad practice, but since my clients may need to reschedule, let me know they’ll be late, or require something urgent, I feel I have to open my inbox more often and for shorter periods of time than Allen recommends. So I’ve decided to adjust my goal to get my inbox down to zero by the end of each day rather than throughout the day to see if that sets me up for greater success. I’ll work on this for the month of April and report back in May.

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