What Do I do With This email?

Hello and welcome to episode 235 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.

Email. Possibly the most revolutionary new form of communication in the business world over the last thirty years. It’s transformed the way businesses communicate with each other and speeded up aspects of our work that in the past took days if not weeks to do before its advent.

However, as with all great new things, it can be abused and email has likely been one of the most abused innovations. Now, things that could have waited until the next meeting, are often quickly written down in an email and sent to the other side of the world, with an expectation of an almost instant reply. And that is where many of the issues with email rest.

But, another problem for us today is where do you put important emails that do not need a reply, but do need to be kept for informational purposes or just in case? That is what we will be exploring this week.

And 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 Anna. Anna asks, hi Carl, I get hundreds of emails each day, many of which do not need a reply, I just need to keep them, and I struggle to know where to put them. I don’t trust sending them to the archive, so I have a huge list of folders that are now overwhelming me. Do you have any tips or tricks to better manage email?

Great question, Anna, thank you for sending it in.

The key to getting on top of email is to understand the basics of what you need. Let me explain:

The inbox is for collecting email. It is where all the messages that are sent to your address will come in. It’s the collection point. The archive is for emails that you’ve either dealt with or want to keep for future reference and then there’s the trash for emails you no longer need to keep.

Now, on their own, those folders could work in a system. But I feel there’s one folder that bridges the gap between the inbox and the archive and that is a folder for emails you need to take action on.

I call this folder the “Action This Day” folder. Any email that requires action from me, will go into that folder. That could be emails I need to reply to, emails I want to read such as newsletters or reference emails with information I want to transfer to a project note.

Over the years, I’ve seen some pretty elaborate structures in email with long lists of project folders or folders for bosses and colleagues emails. These are still the most common ways for people to organise their email. It can work—up to a point. It stops working once the folder list becomes so long it takes forever to find a folder to save a mail message.

And there lies the “secret” to better managing email—speed.

As with most things related to productivity, the less time you spend organising your tools and stuff, the more time you can spend doing the work. All these folders you created, Anna, work if the volume of email you receive is low—less than twenty to thirty mails per day—when you receive over 100 emails a day, this system is going to break. It will slow you down so you spend far too much time organising it instead of dealing with it.

A question I would ask you, is why do you not trust archive? The archive is a great place to store your non-actionable, reference mail because it is searchable via sender’s name, keyword, topic or date range. As long as you know at least one of those search terms, you will find anything in seconds.

Now if there is a fear you will lose it in archive, always remember, if you receive an email there will be a copy of it somewhere. If you replied with an acknowledgement mail (a thank you for sending that mail) then you also have a copy of it in your sent folder. There’s nothing wrong in asking someone to resend an email they sent you. I am sure people would prefer that to someone simply ignoring their mail.

Search within email has come a long way in the last five years. All top email services have excellent search. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail are fast and have multiple ways to find a mail.

There are thousands of articles and videos online explaining how to get the most out of search on these services. This is where we can develop our skills and learn how to search our email effectively. Just type a search query in Google for “How to search Gmail, or Outlook, Apple Mail” etc. Then set aside an hour or two to study.

It will take a little while to become competent at search, but once you learn the basics and apply what you learn, your confidence in your archive will grow and pretty soon you will be able to let go of all those folders.

Now, what about managing your mail. What do you do with it? Well, there are a number of different types of email. The easiest to deal with are all those newsletters you receive that you don’t read.

Often these are newsletters from industry bodies you feel compelled to read because they are about your industry. Now if you read them, great. When they arrive, put them in your action this day folder for reading later in the day.

If you don’t read them, unsubscribe from them.

Here’s an interesting thing, there will always be someone who does read them and if there is anything interesting they will tell you. You can always ask them to forward them the email. Alternatively, you can resubscribe at any time.

The problem I’ve seen is people who subscribe to these newsletters and never read them. They place them in a dedicated folder and pretty soon they have thousands of unread newsletters. Seriously, you are never going to read them. Let them go.

All those mails are taking up digital space and slowing down your mail. You want mail to be fast and efficient. With thousands of unread newsletters clogging up your system, you will be slow.

Get real, and be honest with yourself. If you are not reading these mails, let them go. Unsubscribe.

Actionable mails get dropped into your Action This Day folder for acting on later in the day. These are easy to deal with when you are processing mail. If you need to reply, drop it in your Action This Day folder.

Now those emails that contain a paragraph or two that are relevant to a project but do not need a reply—the CC’d emails. What I do is rather than send the whole email to my project notes, I copy and paste the relevant parts of the email directly into the project note and link back to the original email. If your email app doesn’t allow linking directly to a mail, then copy and paste the title of the email together with the date the mail was sent into your project notes. That way, if you do need to reference the original email again, you have your search terms.

There is a class of mail that doesn’t need a reply immediately but does require a lot of work. This to me is a project and therefore I would treat the email as an instruction to begin a project. That means I open up a project note in my projects folder in my notes app, paste the email and add the link back, then I will add a task in my task manager’s inbox. I can decide later when I will begin work on the project.

The original email is then archived. I have a link back to the original email, and the relevant instructions are now in a project note.

For linking back, Gmail, of course, is the best at this as each email you receive will have its own unique URL. Apple Mail allows you to drag and drop emails into notes that generate an in-system link back, and With Outlook as long as you are using OneNote as your notes app, any email sent to OneNote will also have a track backlink.

And that’s a good point, I know there are a lot of great notes apps around, but you are only making things harder for yourself if you are using Outlook mail and a third-party notes app that doesn’t allow you to link back to an email. Apple Mail and Apple Notes work fantastically together. My advice is don’t make life harder for yourself than is strictly necessary.

Now, what about emails you are waiting for a reply on. This one is interesting because in many ways if you don’t trust the person you sent the email to reply to you, then there’s an issue with trust, not an issue with email. It’s easier to blame mail, a lot harder to blame your own lack of trust.

However, there are some emails you may need to keep as you wait for a response. One of which would online orders. I keep the order confirmation email in a waiting for folder, just in case there is a problem with the order. However, emails I sent to a colleague or client, I would add a note in the relevant project to tell me when I sent an email.

The problem with waiting for folders is they don’t automatically clean themselves out. What I mean is when you get what you asked for, we forget to remove the sent email from our waiting for folder. Pretty soon, that folder fills up with things you are still waiting for and stuff that you received a reply to weeks ago.

This is about minimising what you are keeping. It’s more effective to add a note to the project note with a date you sent the email than it is to add another mail to a waiting for folder.

Another issue I have with waiting for folders is if you have a task that says “get presentation materials from Jane”, and you send the email to Jane asking for the materials, you have not completed the task. You do not have the materials from Jane, therefore the task is not complete. The task was not “send email to Jane” it was to get the presentation materials. Don’t complete the task, reschedule it a day or two in the future. That will be the reminder to you that you still have not received the materials.

Managing email can be simple or complex. Which one you choose will have a big impact on how effective you are at dealing with mail. The truth is we’ve always received a lot of mail. Even before email. The trick is to develop a system that filters out the necessary learning only the necessary to deal with.

One final point. There are two parts to managing email. Processing and doing. Don’t mix up the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as possible. It does not involve doing email—even if it would take two minutes or less. Just clear that inbox as fast as you can. Then set aside an hour at the end of the day for dealing with your actionable mail. Doing it later in the day avoids email ping pong because it’s unlikely you will get a reply on the same day. Reply in the morning and you’ll be doubling up your email.

I have a course on managing email called Email Mastery. I have put a link to that in the show notes for you.

SO, there you go, Anna. I hope that has covered most of the types of emails you receive. 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.