Transcript

[0:00] Everyone just a quick thing before we start the episode. I wanted to let you know about a free Productivity Guide I wrote recently called Finding the Sixth Day:
An engineer’s quick Guide to Making More Time Now. The guide provides a five step process for freeing up eight hours of productive time within the next week.
So if your feeling crunched for time, you should give it a shot. And best of all, it’s free.
All you have to do is go to engineeringandleadership.com/6thday to get your free copy.
That’s engineeringandleadership.com/6thday.

[0:40] For engineers who think reply all should be a thing of the past, this is the engineering and leadership podcast.

[0:48] Music.

[0:57] Pat Sweet here and welcome to Episode 12 of the Engineering and Leadership podcast, the show dedicated to helping engineers thrive. In today’s episode, I give my best strategies for taming your inbox so that you can spend more time on your actual work.

[1:17] Hello everyone, Pat Sweet here. Thank you so much for joining me again today, whether you’re out for a run or driving or maybe mowing the lawn.
Whatever your situation, I’m really glad that you brought me along for the ride.

[1:29] One quick thing that I wanted to mention before we dive in. I’m planning on starting a series of free webinars to help engineering leaders and managers develop real applied management skills, stuff that you can actually use in your day to day work.
What I’d love to know before I start, though, is what would you like to learn about. If you have anything that you’ve always wanted to know more about or something you really struggle with,
there’s something you feel really isn’t covered anywhere else, despite your best efforts of looking for things, I really do want to hear about that. So drop me a line at pat@engineeringandleadership.com and let me know. Looking forward to hearing from you.
All right, let’s move on to the main content for today.

[2:06] Music.

[2:17] 28%. That’s the proportion of time the average knowledge worker spends on email, according to a recent McKinsey study.
That’s 11 hours and 12 minutes out of a 40 hour work week, and for managers, it’s even likely higher than that.

[2:33] Love it or hate it, email is a constant presence for most engineers.
Given that it’s likely that it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future, it’s really important to be able to get the most bang for your buck when you’re spending time in your inbox.
Today, I’m going to give you eight strategies that I use to make sure that I’m not spending a minute more than I have to on emails in the run of a week.
And for those minutes that I do spend, that it’s time well spent.

[3:00] Let’s dig in. Strategy number one is to batch process. A recent Forbes article claimed that the average professional checks email 15 times a day. In an eight hour day, that’s once every 32 minutes.
Now I’ve got a question for you: Do you really need to respond to emails within a half hour?
Is that your expectation of other people? No. Of course it’s not.
If you send someone an email, you don’t expect to hear from them within the half hour. If you do, that’s great.
But that’s not actually your expectation. You’re not watching your clock and waiting 30 minutes and thinking “Well, why in a heck hasn’t Ted responded yet? Something must be wrong.”
So since that doesn’t happen, since there’s no expectation of a 30 minute turnaround, then there’s no actual value to checking your email this frequently.
The cost, on the other hand, is very clear.
The cost is frequent task switching, and I’ve discussed already in a previous episode that when you switch tasks, there are mobilization costs, meaning it takes time to ramp up and hit maximum productivity when you move on to a new task.
So every time you switch from doing something else to email, there’s time there that you cannot recover – unproductive time.
So every time you switch there’s mobilization costs. So if we agree that there is no value in checking email every half hour, but we do agree that there is a cost,

[4:30] we need a better solution. We’ve got to do something different and that something different is to batch process email.
What I do is I schedule literally in my calendar 2 to 3 times a day to check and deal with email and when I’m in there,
I always start with what’s most important first, and I’ll get to that in the next strategy.
Then, at least once every week or two I schedule a huge chunk of time to really get rid – to clean out the rest of my inbox, anything that I didn’t process that I felt wasn’t really important and urgent to deal with in that moment.
I take care of that stuff then, and by and large, I very very rarely miss anything that’s of any actual importance.
Everything else is generally just fluff or FYI type stuff that really isn’t all that important.
So strategy number one batch process your email strategy.
Number two is to respond to the most important emails first, generally, when I take on coaching clients, engineers who are high performance folks who want to get even better, or engineering managers who want to better manage their teams,

[5:38] one of the things we always talk about is email and how you process email.
And one of the mistakes that I see happening very frequently is email gets processed chronologically, meaning some people think that the most recent emails ought to be processed first.
Other people feel that the oldest emails need to be processed first.

[5:57] I don’t buy either one of those strategies. I think email needs to be processed by most important first.
And the way I evaluate importance is, first of all, based on who the sender is.
So I always respond to email from my customers, from my management and from my team before any other email gets addressed.
And it it’s kind of shocking to realize how many emails you get from people who don’t fall in to one of those three categories.
I was a half. The email that I get comes from people who are not either a customer, a manager or a member of my team. It’s really quite surprising.
So when you think about it that way, when you think about the fact that you can, you can really ignore half the email you get because it doesn’t fall within one of these core stakeholder groups.
All of a sudden, your job of processing email gets much, much easier.
So once I’ve dealt with email from those important people, I then shift my attention to any emails that have that important marker, that read exclamation mark.
Some people are really diligent about only using that in times of actual need. Other people,
it seems like every email they send has that important tag and everything is all caps.

[7:13] You need to use a little bit of judgement to decide which one is which.
And if you’ve worked where you work for any length of time you know who sends red exclamation marks on every email. You could probably skip those, but all the other ones – probably good idea to take a look at those.

[7:29] I also am very particular about processing invitations. If people are making requests for my time, I treat that as though it may be important.
And I’m very quick to make a decision on whether or not I can support that person in their request for my time.

[7:47] So that’s That’s the other major category. So your email inbox to me should be treated like an emergency room.
Worst comes first, but in this case it’s not worst. It’s most important needs to come first.
So strategy number two – respond based on importance as opposed to chronologically. Strategy number three is to not start your day with email. And this is related to strategy number one
where I’m talking about batching. Most people… the very first thing they do in the morning is they sit at the computer,
they open up their email client, and they spend the first several hours of their day in their inbox.
I think it’s a terrible way to start the day for a couple reasons. One,
It makes you feel like you’re getting something done because you’re getting very concrete feedback. You’re seeing this list disappear in front of you. That’s very satisfying, but your job buy and large is probably not to process email.
Email is a tool that gets used in order to do whatever your job actually is.
So instead of doing that job, you’re using this tool, which may or may not actually be helping you accomplish what you’re on the payroll to do.

[9:01] So instead of starting your day with email, what I recommend is you start your day with your most important task –
the one thing that if it were the only thing that you would get done today, you could go home feeling good about having actually accomplished something concrete. That’s your most important task, your MIT.
Instead of opening your email inbox, get to work on your MIT. Even if you only spend the first hour of your day, that’s a much better way to start the day.
So strategy number three: Don’t start your day with email.

[9:32] If you absolutely have to, you can.
If you’re very, very disciplined about it, you can open your email and take a quick scan to see if there’s anything that really, truly is an urgent tire fire that needs to be dealt with again.
You should be scanning emails from your customers, your management and your team.
I would even suggest setting a timer so that you’re not in there any more than maybe 10 minutes, because again, it’s really easy to get swept up in your inbox and feel like you’re getting things done when really you’re not.
So again, strategy Number three: Don’t start your day with the email. Strategy number four is to choose your medium.

[10:12] Email is easy, right? It’s very it’s quick.
It’s straightforward. It’s simple. There’s a lot going for email in terms of a communication medium.
The problem is, it’s not always the best tool for the job.
If you have a think about who you’re trying to communicate to, what you’re trying to communicate, the nature of the conversation that you expect to drive based on whatever it is you’re sending,
maybe email isn’t the best way to go. So the problem with sending an email when some other method might be more appropriate is two fold: one,
if you’re sending email, you’re likely to get email in response, again, whether or not it’s the most effective and efficient way for the responder to communicate.
So when you send email, you get email back, and this is the whole problem that we’re trying to solve here is not spending more time than we ought to in our in boxes.
So if there’s a better way to communicate, use that better way, even if it’s harder in the moment.
If it could be more efficient and effective, it’s worth your while.
And there’s the bonus of also avoiding the inevitable email responses that that would invoke.

[11:26] The other thing is that if email is not the best way to communicate your message, there’s a risk of miscommunication, which creates a whole other host of headaches.
Always, always, always be diligent. Be intentional about the specific communication method that you choose.
Don’t just email because it’s there because the you’re responding to someone who emailed you in the first place. That’s not a good enough reason.
There are lots of other alternatives. You could send an instant message.
You can pick up the phone. There’s video chat meetings, face to face conversation, slack message boards, newsletters, blog posts, social media.
Heck, you could start an internal podcast.
There are lots of other ways to communicate, so don’t be quick too lean on email.
Every method has its pros and cons, so choose wisely.
Strategy number five is to pick your recipients. Now, I’m gonna ask you kind of a personal question here, and I want you to answer honestly, you don’t – you don’t have to tell me. Obviously, this is a podcast so you’re not going to be able to tell me, but but for yourself, answer honestly.
Are you that person who replies all every time, even when the sender asks you not to?
Because if you are, you and I need to have a heart to heart.

[12:41] Your colleagues are judging you. I’m telling you. If you’re that person who replies all you need to not be that person who replies all, unless it really is important for everyone who was copied in the first place

[12:54] to hear what your response is when you send or respond to an email, it’s very important.
Be particular about who needs that message.
Who is going to take action either today or at some point in the future based on what you have to say.
And this is really important – there are two reasons that this is important.
One. You want to help keep your colleagues in boxes clean right?
You want to do for others what you are trying to achieve here, which is to spend less time your inbox and spend quality time with the time you do have to spend in your inbox.
And the second thing is to avoid confusion. When you communicate to people who don’t need to hear the message, there’s a risk of churn.
There’s a risk of creating these situations where you need to clarify messages to people who don’t need to hear the message in the first place.
There’s an incredible amount of time spent communicating to people who don’t need the message in the first place.
But because they know the message is out there, they feel the need to be involved.
So strategy number five – be very, very particular about who you’re sending messages to.
You need to make sure that you catch everyone who needs the message, but not a person more than that. Strategy number six is Ohio. Now, Ohio stands for Only Handle It Once.

[14:18] If you’re going to dedicate time to email, just deal with it. Use that time.
Read your email, respond to the email then and there, if at all possible and move on.
Don’t read something and kind of set it aside and not really process it, but kind of think about it.
No, if you’re gonna be in your inbox,
read your email. Respond to your email. Now, If you don’t have an answer right away, that’s OK.
But what you do then is hit respond to the email saying Yes, I acknowledge that you’re asking a question or you need something or whatever the case may be.
You say I don’t have an answer for you right now, but I will get back to you by a certain date, and then you move the task to your to do list and then archive whatever message was in your inbox.
Ohio: Only Handle It Once.
Strategy number seven that I use is not to waste your time filing. Now,
I used to be the kind of person who had an incredibly elaborate email filing system.
Melville Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System himself would have been amazed at this system that I created. It was… it was a thing of beauty.

[15:29] The problem was sophisticated systems are tough to maintain.
It took time and energy to file every message that I got and retrieve messages that were a little bit ambiguous.
Maybe the sender covered three different topics in a particular email or a couple different projects or a couple different action items, then what do you do?
It’s very easy for things to get convoluted and for you to have to check several places in a sophisticated system.

[16:00] What I realized after some time is I had kind of given up on using my email file system, and I was defaulting to using the search function in outlook.
If you understand basic search operators in outlook, it’s much, much faster. Generally to find what you’re looking for based on whether or not the message had an attachment.
If you know who it came from, basically what the subject was.
If you know anything about the email, it’s probably easier to find it using search.
Really, don’t waste your time filing.
It takes time and mental energy to decide how to file it, and it doesn’t actually end up helping you in the end, in terms of finding things when you need them later.
Finally, strategy number eight is turn notifications off.
You have enough distraction during your day. You’ve got people calling you. You’ve got meetings. You’ve got people popping by your desk.
If you happen to be working in an office environment since you’re batching email – because you’re following strategy number one – you don’t need to see every email that comes in.
You can even be bold and tell your team that. Listen, if you need me urgently, pick up the phone or send me an IM.

[17:13] There are still ways for people to reach out to you if they need something quickly.
But people need to learn that you aren’t going to turn email messages around in a half hour and guess what? That’s reasonable.
It’s OK. In most office environments that I’m familiar with, a 24 hour turnaround is considered normal. That’s the expectation.
So you don’t need notifications on. The only thing that can serve to do is distract you from getting the real work done that you’re trying to focus on right now.