Embracing Slow Productivity for Effective Email Management

Do you feel you are rushing from one task to another while not getting anything important done? Well, this week, I’m going to share with you a few ways to change that. 

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Script | 353

Hello, and welcome to episode 354 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show.

What’s the rush? This is one of those powerful questions you can ask yourself when processing the things you have collected in your inboxes. 

It’s easy today to feel that everything you are asked to do must be done immediately. While there is a category of tasks that require quick action, most of what comes across your desk (or pops up on your screen) does not fall into that category. 

The trick, of course, is knowing which is which. This is where developing confidence in your judgement and abilities helps. But that can only come from establishing some “rules”. In a way, automating your decision-making.

I recently heard an interview with President J F Kennedy, in which he said as president, the kind of decisions you make are always high-level. Anything smaller will be dealt with at a lower level and rarely reach your desk. 

That’s an example of government in action. The president or Prime Minister cannot decide everything. Lower-level, less urgent things can and should be handled at a department level. 

That’s the same for you. Most of your decisions should be automated. What kind of emails are actionable, and what can be archived or deleted, for example. 

So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Edward. Edward asks, Hi Carl, I recently read your newsletter in which you wrote about slowing down. Could you explain a little more how to slow down and still be productive?

Hi Richard, thank you for your question.

One of the disadvantages of technology and how it has advanced over the last twenty years is the speed at which tasks can now be done. 

While technology has speeded up incredibly, our human brains have not. That causes us many issues. 

The biggest issue is because everyone knows how quickly we can reply to an email, they expect almost instant replies which ignores the fact we might being doing something else. 

For example, when I am driving or in a meeting or on a call, I cannot reply to an “urgent” email or message. I am doing something else. 

In the days before email, there was a natural delay. I remember when I was working in a law firm, email was very new and lawyers didn’t trust it. So, we continued writing letters. This meant, if we received a letter in the morning, we had until 4 pm to reply—that was when the mail went to the post office.

If we missed the post, that was okay, we could blame the post office. And that was accepted. 

Other lawyers knew this as did our clients and the clients of the other lawyers. 

This also meant we had time to think about our response, talk to a colleague if necessary or escalate to our boss if the issue was complex. 

Today, we often don’t feel we have that time. The truth is you do. 

One thing I’ve learned is when someone sends you something they are secretly hoping you do not respond quickly. They’re snowed under with work too. If you reply quickly, you’ve just given them more work to do today. You’re not going to be their favourite person. 

One of the easiest ways to reduce some of this anxiety is to put in place some rules. 

Let me give you an example. I receive around 100 to 150 emails a day. Most of the mail I receive comes through the night. I therefore process my inbox each morning before I start my work. The goal of processing my inbox is to clear it as fast as possible. 

There’s no time for applying the legendary two-minute rule (where anything that can be done in two minutes or less should be done). All I need is ten emails where I could apply the two-minute rule and I’ve lost twenty minutes. 

No thank you. I want a cleared inbox as quickly as possible. I’ve applied this rule for over ten years now and can clear 150 emails in less than twenty minutes. My record is 380 (ish) emails cleared in 36 minutes. 

Then around 4 pm, I will go to my email’s Action This Day folder. Begin with the oldest email and work my way through that for an hour. I aim to respond to any actionable email within 24 hours. And I would say I have a 95% success rate with that “rule”. 

It’s a process I repeat every day, and it’s ensured I never have an overwhelming backlog in email at any time. 

Now, I do have some rules. For example, anything involving money, whether that is issuing a refund, or sorting out a discount code, I will deal with as soon as I see the issue—people are sensitive when it comes to money. 

Also, questions from my Membership Community have priority as well as people who may have forgotten their password or are experiencing other difficulties getting into their learning centre dashboard. 

Fortunately, these instances are rare. Perhaps three or four a month. 

You can also apply rules for your core work—the work you are employed to do. Because your core work is work you have to do regularly, it’s easy to set up processes to do the work. 

Once you have a process set up, you can protect the time on your calendar to ensure you have the time to do the work. 

Because a process is something you repeat, you soon get fast at doing it. It’s a human form of automation. If you can fix it for the same time and day, it gets even better because you can start to accurately predict how long it will take you. And your colleagues learn your routines and will leave you alone. 

My wife knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 every morning, I am doing my creative work and to leave me alone. That took a lot of training hahaha.

There is a trick I learned from former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir was Prime Minister between 1986 and 1992, so before the proliferation of email and instant messages. 

Whenever a letter or memo came into his office, he would move it to the side and leave it there for a week or ten days. What he discovered was that 90% of what had come in had resolved itself. The ten percent that was left was where he needed to apply his attention. 

Rushing to respond or complete a piece of work often leads to unnecessary work. How many times have you responded to an email a few days after receiving it, only to be told the issue has been resolved? 

Now you may not be able to sit on something today for a week, but it is possible to pause for 24 hours. All you need is a little confidence in yourself. 

Slowing down is a great way to reduce the amount of work you have. 

I remember when I used to pounce on an email from a student asking for help logging into their account, only to find a subsequent email come in telling me they had resolved their issue. 

Now I wait an hour before responding. That way if a student does resolve their issue I am not wasting precious time resetting passwords that don’t need to be done. 

I’m reminded of this question: What the rush? With 2025 goals. 

It doesn’t matter what you have done on the 31st January. A 2025 goal is about what you have accomplished on the 31st December. The start will always be messy and inconsistent. 

It’s likely you original ideas don’t work, but with a little patience and a few adjustments you will find the right strategy. The result you want will come on 31st December, not 31 January. You have plenty of time. 

This idea of slowing down is at the heart of the Time Sector System. In the course, I recommend you default all new inputs to your Next Week folder. Something would have to be genuinely urgent to go into the This Week folder. 

By applying the default to your Next Week folder, when you do the weekly planning it’s fantastic to discover that thirty to forty percent of what’s in there no longer needs to be done. 

My wife is a get it done now person. Everything is urgent, even when it’s not. Out accountant in Korea is the opposite. Our accountant will ask us for the bank and credit card statements around six weeks before she needs them. When my wife receives that message, everything stops, and she rushes around trying to collect everything together in one afternoon.

It leaves her exhausted, and inevitably, something’s missed, and she then has to repeat the stress the following week. 

You want to be like our accountant. Work from your calendar, and ensure that you give yourself sufficient time to collect information. You don’t need to rush around panicking then. 

Slow down, protect sufficient time for the bigger tasks and default all new tasks to next week. You will find you have less to do, and what you do have to do can be done slowly, more meticulously and with fewer mistakes. 

Thank you, Edward, 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.