We just took the boys, teenagers both, to the pediatrician. Now that they’re 15 and 18, that paper we get listing healthy behaviors is more complicated and involved than when they were five and eight. Eat fresh fruit, don’t do drugs, look both ways before crossing the street–but you really wanna help your kids have healthy, happy lives?: Teach them how to zero out their email inboxes.
Now, you might say, clever wag that you are, “Oh, they won’t be using email.”
Nonsense. They might be be Snapping and Insta-ing and Finsta-ing and all the rest while cocooned up in their teenage nests, but when they hit the work world, they’re gonna be slogging through email like most professionals.
If you want them to help them have fulfilling lives, they’re gonna have to get to the bottom of that email inbox. Otherwise, they’ll join the hordes of people stumbling around knowing, every waking minute, that they have thousands of communications that were directed to them that they are not addressing.
It’s gotta be downright unnatural.
You might say that zeroing out is a fool’s mission. Impossible. But this recent Fast Company piece “This is the system that helps me achieve Inbox Zero every day [1]” will tell ya how it’s done. Commit to dates and schedules. “Understand email life cycles.” Use a “false inbox.” There’s genius at work here.
To a lesser degree, I can also tell you how it’s done, because I do it, although, dammit, not every day. The email comes in raging clumps, but several times a year, I drain it to zero. I have, I think, four main email accounts I need to check and a couple other straggler accounts. The big daddy is my work email. Zilching it out is about discipline and mindset:
- Use rules to send mail to folders. I receive many email newsletters and subscribe to numerous listservs (remember those things? They’re still useful). All that stuff goes into a folder. Setting up a rule using most email clients is stupidly easy. You just say any email from @__ goes into __ folder. Then it does. Like magic.
- Count to 10. Short of a massive, blind, mass deletion, no one can knock out 250 emails. It’s too daunting. But anyone can knock out 10. When the inbox grows, I’ll commit to 10 several times a day. It’s manageable and goal-oriented, like checking items off a checklist. I go from 59 to 49. Then 39. I make a little progress, and then I move on.
- Group your mind. I suspect most people, even those who receive hundreds of messages, tend to get them in category/subject clumps. I have created lots of folders, and I move lots of mail immediately into those folders; then I create a “to do” on my calendar to deal with that category. This makes a few good things happen. Mainly, you will be responding in the same category, so there will tend to be some redundancy of thinking, a grouping in your mind, that will make it easier. But you also may find that those ten emails boiled down to three.
- I don’t respond right away. I always respond to your email–but just not right away. I have other things to do. Of course, I respond to emergencies, and I’m quicker to respond to my students. But, in general, emails generate–no surprise!–more emails. I avoid interminable back-and-forth conversations. (By the way, I’m even stricter with this when it comes to texting, the communications time suck.)
- Don’t get lulled by the weather. If your email is always open, that drift of messages, that flurry of digital weather, is always present. You don’t prepare yourself, and instead can end up sitting around letting emails float onto your tongue. But when you venture into the storm periodically, you prepare, you dig for a while, and you get out. Sometimes, a message does need to sit and when it does you often realize you didn’t need to respond after all.
- Commit. My whole life is not about email. But I commit to not getting beaten to work death by emails. I just don’t give up keeping after it.
I have two children in college. Soon a third will join them. I want them to be safe and sound. I also can’t help them enough with time management. I’ve found myself saying to students that nowadays the race may not go to the swiftest or the strongest or the smartest–it may in fact be won by the most organized.
Control email. It’s some advice that will help them manage their time and maybe not miss out on some of the great stuff college has to offer.
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[4]Scott Warnock [5]
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