How to Handle Email When It Takes More Than 2 Hours to Respond

This week’s question is all about managing your communications and ensuring you have enough time to deal with it every day. 

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Episode 273 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 273 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Last week, I talked about how by turning everything into a project was a sure fire way to become overwhelmed and overstretched. Instead, I suggested you look for the processes for doing your work. 

If you write articles, create marketing campaigns, deal with clients on a frequent basis, then these are not projects. They are just a part of a process for doing your work. 

However, there are some parts of our work that are difficult to develop processes for and one of those is handling all the communications you get each day. 

Prior to 2000—before the current digital age, most communications largely came from mail, telephone or fax. That meant things were relatively easy to manage—there were only three channels of communication and each one gave us a logical timeline for a response. A letter could be responded to within a week or two, a telephone call was instant—if we were near a phone—and a fax could be sat on for a couple of days. There was not sense we had to respond immediately.

Today, thing are quite different. Almost all the messages we receive today could be responded to immediately. 

I remember reading the book: The Man With The Golden Typewriter, a book of letters written by Ian Fleming, and awed by the number of letters beginning with the words: “Please accept my apologies for the delay in my reply. I have just returned from an eight week sabbatical in Jamaica”. 

That’s two months to reply and nobody would have been angry. It was just the way life was back then. Not necessarily slower, just there were conventions in place and acceptable reasons for not responding in a timely manner. 

Back to today, how do we manage our communications so they do not become overwhelming and out of control. Well, before we get to that answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks: Hi Carl, I was hoping you have some advice for organising all the messages and emails I get each day. My company uses Microsoft Teams and it’s always alerting me to new messages. And Emails are a joke. It takes me all afternoon just to stay on top of these. Do you have any ideas for handling these?

Hi Annie, thank you for sending in your question. 

It’s a timely question too as I covered communications last week in my productivity workshop and there were a lot of questions about getting on top of these. 

Let’s deal with email first as this is the easiest to manage. With email we can create a simple process that if followed each day, will get you on top of it and keep you on top of it. 

There are two parts to managing email: processing and doing. The key is not to mix the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as you can. This means when you open your inbox, the goal is to get to zero. This means you do not want to be stopping to reply to those emails you think will take two minutes or less (they rarely take two minutes—more like five or six minutes) 

Any actionable email get sent to an Action This Day folder and everything else is either deleted or archived. Now that’s a quick summary, but the essence is get that inbox cleared. 

The second part of the email management process is to “do email”. This means as late in the day as you feel comfortable with, you go into your actionable email and begin with the oldest one and work your way through the list. Now, you may not be able to clear them all each day, but as long as you begin with the oldest one, you will not have emails hanging around. 

The key to this method or process is to decide how much time you need on average to clear your action this day folder. 

To give you a benchmark, I need around forty to forty-five minutes each day to stay on top of my actionable email. What I do is schedule an hour each day for dealing with my communications. I have this scheduled and blocked off in my calendar for between 4:30 and 5:30pm each day. 

If you want to learn more about this process, I have a free download available on my website under the downloads section where you can get the workflow in its entirety. If you want to go deeper with this, I also have a comprehensive course called “Email Mastery” which will show you how to set everything up and turn you into a master of email. 

The key this is consistency. If you do this sporadically, it will not work. 

The way I look at it is if I skip a day, that means I now need two hours the next day to get on top of email. I don’t have two hours spare in the middle of the week to deal with email—there’s a lot more important things to do. 

So, that one hour a day is non-negotiable. It gets done. 

Last week in my Productivity workshop, one of the participants asked me how to handle email when it takes more than two hours just to reply to a single email? Here’s a unique problem—most email does not take more than two hours to respond. However, if you do get an email that requires two hours or more work, that becomes a task in your task manager. 

The question is: where will you find the two hours to work on that email response? If you leave an email like that in your Action This Day folder, it will list there for a long time and no work will get done on it. It needs pulling out and putting into your task manager and you can then decide when you will work on it. 

Now, what about all those messages? 

Here’s the thing about messages. You don’t have to respond immediately. Let me repeat that: You do not need to respond immediately. 

Now let that sink in for a minute. 

Let’s look at this logically, if you were working on something important that required all your concentration, why would you allow a message to interrupt your chain of thought? 

A doctor performing open heart surgery is not going to stop in the middle of the operation to read and respond to a text message. A pilot in the process of taking off or landing their plane is not going to look at her messages. And a lawyer defending you in court is not going to allow themselves to be distracted by messages coming in. How would you feel if they were always pausing their arguments to read and reply to their messages? I’m sure you’d be wanting to fire your lawyer. 

So why do you allow it to happen to you? 

To me, this is about professional standards. But then I get annoyed when I stand in line at the bank for ten minutes only to get to the counter and the bank clerk answers his phone while I am talking to him. Ooh that really annoys me. The most annoying thing is that phone call likely came from his boss. Why is his boss more important than a customer? 

For the less urgent messages, you can deal with these as part of your communication hour, however, if they are urgent don’t feel obligated to respond immediately. Finish what you are doing before replying. 

There’s a reason for this. You want to be slowing down the response time. You see, if you set an expectation with your boss, clients or customers and colleagues that you respond immediately, then you’ve just caused yourself a lot of problems later down the line. 

The goal is to slow things down. A good tip here is to add your response times to your email signature. For example:

Email: 24 hours

Messages: within 6 hours

Telephone call: within 2 hours. 

This way you are telling people that you know the importance of your work. And constantly being distracted by messages is going to destroy your effectiveness at doing the work you are employed to do. 

Look at it this way, nobody gets promoted because they answer their messages immediately. They get promoted for the quality of their work. People remember you for the work you produce. Always remember that. 

Now, I understand this can be a bit scary when you first begin to do it—particularly if you have a boss that expects instant responses—but you can do this gradually. Perhaps for one week, leave each message for fifteen minutes before responding. Then the following week, extend that to thirty minutes. 

Keep doing that until you get someone complaining. This way you will find the balance. 

You phone and computer have a do not disturb function. You can turn this on when you need to focus. There’s a reason why so many productivity and time management specialists harp on about this. It works. And you do not need to turn this on all day. You turn it on when you need some distraction free time to do your work—the work you are employed to do. 

I find, I can respond to instant messages in between sessions of work. As I am writing this script, I will likely have received four or five emails and a few messages. I don’t know exactly because I haven’t looked. 

However, it takes me around ninety minutes to write this script, so nobody will be waiting long for my response. When I finish the script, I will stand up and use my phone to check messages and email. I can do that while walking around and then make a decision about which ones I will respond to. 

Finally, reduce your communication channels. If you have every social media messaging service, Teams and Slack as well as several email accounts, is it any wonder you are inundated with messages? Reduce these channels.

The great thing about reducing your communications channels is you reduce the number of time wasters. You force people to communicate with you on your terms. For instance, my wife and mother know the best way to get in touch with me is through iMessage. I only give that out to family and very close friends. 

Everyone else I advise to contact me though email because I have a process for handling email and it means I can work on my timeline. 

There have been occasions where I was asked to use WhatsApp or Telegram for a particular event I was speaking at. I will install the app for the duration of the event, and as soon as it’s over, I delete the app. 

If someone really wants to get in touch with you, they will. They will find a way. 

So there you go, Annie. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.