Conferences & Technology

Don’t Let Email Ruin Your Productivity. Here’s How.

By: Leslie Belknap

Don’t Let Email Ruin Your Productivity. Here’s How.

Managing email is a daily struggle for many people.

While email is a required part of the job for most professionals, the battle of the inbox can have a seriously negative impact; people who manage a busy inbox report low job satisfaction and perceive email as a great source of stress.

Here are a few tips to help you avoid the stress and negative consequences of email. Hopefully these tips help you reclaim some of your time so you can focus on more interesting and important tasks, such as preparing for an upcoming presentation.

1. Delegate Your Inbox.

Follow in the footsteps of John Jacobs and Bert Jacobs, founders of the New England-based apparel company Life is Good, and quit using email. Yes, you read that correctly – founders of a $100 million company have successfully quit email while still running their successful business.

Before quitting email altogether, the Jacobs brothers first tried to minimize the amount of time they spent in their inboxes by only answering emails one day a week. But that didn’t really help because we had to deal with the same amount of emails, John explained to Business Insider.

After that email management technique proved ineffective, they decided to completely close their email accounts. Now they only communicate with people by phone or during in-person meetings. In addition, every two weeks their team gives them a summary of the most important communication.

If you can delegate email communication to members of your team, do it. The Jacobs brothers reported feeling liberated after they quit email, and you will likely feel free as well.

If you cannot delegate the management of your inbox to an employee, but still want to opt out of email, consider setting an autoresponder email that lets people know you do not check your inbox – ever. In the autoresponder email, provide your phone number and ask people to call you as they will not be receiving a response to their email. If you worry that your request might upset people, use your autoresponder remind email to remind people that speaking on the phone will be a more personal and more effective way to communicate. When you let people know that your refusal to use email will result in a more personal and productive interaction, they will probably welcome the opportunity to forgo the email exchange for real conversation.

Since you likely do not have the luxury of opting of email completely, below you will find a few tips to help you manage the flood of email that you are probably currently experiencing.

2. Replace Email.

To help professionals minimize the negative impact of email, innovators have developed some exciting new options for communication and collaboration.

One of the most popular options is Slack, a communication tool with real-time messaging, archiving, and search features. Slack lets you organize your conversations in open channels, as well as private channels and direct messages for more sensitive conversations. You can make a channel for a project, a topic, a team, or anything, and everyone has a transparent view of all that’s going on across all open channels.

If you’re organizing an event and find it difficult to manage all of the various updates, questions, and ideas from vendors, partners, sponsors, venue managers, and collaborators, you are an ideal user for EventGeek. With EventGeek, you can stop the endless email chains, confusing spreadsheets, static PDFs, and annoying voicemails that are often part of managing events. EventGeek brings together all the things you and your team need to deliver superb events.

At TEDxNashville, we have reduced the number of email exchanges by creating Facebook groups for some of our teams. For example, our speaker coaches now ask questions and share resources by posting to the Speaker Coaches Facebook group. If we have a time-sensitive update or question, email is still an option however we have a policy that phone calls are the preferred form of communication for this type of urgent information. Since most people check Facebook at least once per day, everyone is still receiving information in a timely manner, however our inboxes are less cluttered. Before we set up the Facebook group, coaches would often ask questions already asked by other coaches, however since those questions were previously asked via one-to-one email exchanges, the information was not available to the entire group which meant we had to respond to questions multiple times – a productivity nightmare. The Facebook groups have solved many of our communication problems.

3. Schedule Blocks Of Time.

If you absolutely must use email, don’t react to new emails throughout the day. Instead, schedule specific times for writing, reviewing, and responding to emails. However, don’t schedule time for email during your peak hours of performance. For example, if you’re a morning person who starts to lose focus in the afternoon, avoid your inbox in the morning hours, and schedule time for emails in the afternoon, when you wouldn’t be your most productive anyways.

If you’re concerned you will miss important emails that need an immediate response, set up an autoresponder email to communicate your new schedule for checking your inbox. By communicating your email schedule, you’re changing the expectation that you will respond immediately to emails. Since about one-third of US workers report replying within 15 minutes of receiving a work email, and three-fourths reply within an hour, resetting expectations is an important part of changing your relationship to email. Your email contacts might currently expect quick responses from you, however they will eventually adjust to your new way of communicating.

In addition, in your autoresponder email you should provide a phone number that you encourage people to use if they need a response before your next scheduled time for email. If their email is truly urgent, they will call you, so don’t sweat it.

If you schedule 30 minutes a day for email, set a timer and stick to this length of time. If some emails require a complex response that will push you beyond your scheduled amount of email time, don’t try to respond to those emails immediately. Instead send a short response to those email senders and let them know when you will be able to provide a thorough response. Then, add to your to-do list the tasks you need to complete to answer the complicated emails. Once those items are on your to-do list, move on – don’t let any emails slow you down and take up extra, unscheduled time in your day.

If you decide to schedule multiple blocks of time for email, don’t schedule more than three daily inbox check-ins. A study by the University of British Columbia reports checking email more than three times a day leads to elevated stress. When you consider that the average person checks their inbox approximately fifteen times per day, only checking your inbox three times a day might be a big change for you, however the reduced stress will make it worth the effort.

4. Turn Off Notifications.

Turning off your email notifications is the best trick to help you stick to an email schedule. If your notifications are not turned off, you will quickly drain your willpower reserves as you try to ignore the notifications that continually pop-up on your screen. Save your willpower for important decisions and avoid unnecessary distractions by turning off the notifications.

It will only take one enticing email notification to pull you into your inbox. Before you know it, you will be answering other emails in addition to the one that caught your eye via a notification. You will potentially lose minutes or hours responding to emails you did not plan to answer at that time. Once you resurface from your inbox, you will have to try to get back on track with whatever you were doing before the notification sidetracked you.

Turning off notifications for Gmail is simple:

1. Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of your inbox.

2. Click on settings.

3. Scroll down to desktop notifications.

4. Select Mail notifications off.

5. Be Brief.

When you sit down to manage your email, try to clean out your inbox completely at that time. You will feel a sense of accomplishment and also avoid that nagging feeling caused by unanswered emails if you can respond to every email in your inbox.

If your inbox explodes with email every day, the only way to completely clean out your inbox daily is to be brief in your emails. If you find that some emails require a complex explanation, you should consider picking up the phone instead of replying via email. A phone call will likely be easier and faster anyways. In addition, if your email was going to be lengthy, the other people on the email chain would have probably replied with their own lengthy response – this is a vicious cycle that you should stop before it wastes too many people’s time – including your own.