I’m not a big fan of email.
The volume of it, the etiquette, the BCC’s and the reply all’s. But mostly I dislike our collective dependence on it.
People can close their Facebook account, they can refuse to join Twitter, even shun WhatsApp. But email? Every adult in the corporate world has to have email. Thems the rules.
Which means dealing with information overload is just an occupational hazard. I certainly prescribed to that way of thinking for years, before I finally thought “sod it”.
Email Overload and Inbox Shame
When I worked as at a marketing and communications agency, I lived in Outlook. Every damn day.
It was (and remain to be for most) the primary method of client communication. Fine. Am on-board with that.
However, I was copied in to all client correspondence from all members of my team (despite urging them that this was not always necessary). I would also receive at least 40 notes a day from partners just to “keep me in the loop”, a fair number of sales emails “circling back”, notwithstanding all my Google news alerts, newsletters, competitor briefings, journalist correspondence, meeting requests, research reports, internal management issues and more.
Most of which I had to read, many of which I had to respond to, some of them urgently and with careful consideration.
And that was just the correspondence I received. I was as guilty with a list of outgoing emails as long as my arm each day, filling up the inboxes of all the other poor souls out there.
It makes me tired just thinking about it.
The sheer number of emails we all trawl through each day is exactly why you have email folders, right? It’s why people apply urgency flags and read receipts, why we neatly file email correspondence into a personal hierarchy of labels and inbox folders?
Not I.
The state of my inbox has long been a fascination of my colleagues throughout my career. 10,000 is perfectly normal. 15,000 is not unheard of. Hell, I’ll admit I’ve done 30,000+.
I refuse to feel ashamed by this. My inbox is an inbox. It is not a to do list, nor a storage system. The number of emails has never bothered me or, more importantly, hampered my ability to get stuff done. It does seem to really bother those who err on the other side of the inbox-size dilemma – what I call the dark side; the inbox zero fanatics.
You know the ones, they talk about it a lot. Like vegans.
My Inbox Zero Fail
I tried what I thought was the concept of inbox zero once. A constant email purge, plus a rapid fire of responses at 7pm; I diligently mucked out those I had ‘actioned’ from that main view so it was as close to clean as possible for the next day.
I lasted two weeks.
While I understand that process works for some, it was not sustainable for me. I wasted hours every day filing away emails into outlook folders and sub-folders. I spent more time in my inbox, not less.
When Merlin Mann first presented the idea of Inbox Zero at Google in 2007, he wasn’t referring to the number of unread messages you have, nor was he supposing we all reach for the illusive empty inbox on a daily basis. Rather, he was referring to how much time and, more importantly head space, we all dedicate to our inboxes every day.
His point was about cutting down the amount of time your “brain is in your inbox.”
For so many of us, email is a distraction. When you live in your inbox, it’s a constant feed of information. It sucks you in, you waste 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there and before you know it you’re two hours into the working day and still haven’t started to wade through the actual work you need to get on with.
Now, of course, we all use Slack. But that hasn’t replaced email or relieved the “attention” problem. On the contrary it has exacerbated it. We find ourselves with just another demanding toddler, crying for our attention. One that won’t stop or go away until you respond.
Sound familiar? Regardless of whether you’re an inbox zero pedant or a 5,000+ unread hero like me, the chances are that email is killing your productivity one way or another.
The key is finding a way to manage the distraction, find a way to stop being “tied” to email.
Seeing Email for What it Really Is
It’s an indispensable communications tool. I’m okay with that. It isn’t, however, a productivity environment, and it sure as hell isn’t a document management system.
No business ever said, “Hey, let’s use Outlook as our firm-wide document storage/ system of record/ communication archive – it’s perfect’. It happens by default, because it’s what we all use, day in, day out, without fail.
Traipsing through emails is not a productive use of anyone’s time, let alone an efficient way to extract and apply knowledge.
IDC data in recent years has shown that knowledge workers spend about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the workday, searching for information.
You see the problem with email use in this scenario, is that it takes all your content, critical client knowledge and just keeps it. Right there, in your inbox. Filed or not. It doesn’t expand it, enrich it, share it, enable it to be applied to add value.
Instead of using email as a dumping ground for silos of information, I started using it for what it is, I use it as a communications tool. And it’s worked.
I realized I don’t have the workflow habits (or the time, or patience that others have) to apply a convoluted filing system in my inbox for what I deem as limited reward.
So I made sure that I was curating the really important stuff. I’ll call out here that I work for a knowledge management SaaS company, I think (and write) about curated views and find-ability a lot. But if it’s in an email and something I want to memorialize – I send it out of email and document it.
I also don’t use my inbox as a to-do list. If it’s at the top of my inbox it’s the most recent, if it’s unread it’s unread, that’s the extent of it. There are plenty of cost-effective task management/ pipeline tools out there that I had no need business trying to back my bulging inbox into a useful task tool.
Another “oh, this works!” moment was taking stuff offline. I would never say that phrase – honest. But I do it; I talk more. And it works.
Same with Slack; if you’ve gone back and forth on a topic for more than 5 minutes, often writing IMs furiously while the other person is typing too, it probably makes sense to quickly hop on a zoom. It’ll be quicker. It will definitely be less frustrating.
It’s just the basics; collate the questions that forever go back and forth and eliminate any chance of miscommunication by means of the spoken word. Pick up the phone, sit down face to face, jump on a 5 minute zoom. I thoroughly recommend it.
The final part was getting comfortable with email search. It works for me. Most email clients make it easy-enough to search email, especially if – like me – you’re a constant scan reader and have decent memory retention. All of which comes in handy when you have an inbox of 10,000+.
More (and More) Next Generation Email Platforms
There’s been plenty of “reimagining” when it comes to the email platform over the years. It’s having another resurgence. Hey! the consent-based email platform, is making a lot of noise right now. Perhaps it can make a difference to the volume and spam-based email woes so many have.
Plenty of people I know bemoan the mass marketing noise, the cold-call messages and the SDR follow-up cadences. I get how a screener pre-inbox and consent-based ecosystem could certainly take email back to a place of warranted communication for many. Though for me this is not the core email issue. I may be one of the few that want to receive those emails; I clock them, sometimes read them, and most oftentimes choose not to reply. But occasionally I do. I like having that option.
Superhuman also continues to grab attention (and users). Its email smarts seem to goes the other way to Hey!. Beyond it’s “super fast” tagline, it adds insights and context into your email workflow to bring more detail into your email communication. You can “see what people look like, where they’re based, and what they do. Find ways to break the ice, topics to bond over, and reasons to get back in touch…”
That makes me squirm a little, so it may not be my killer-app. But then again I am not a VC or a VP Sales. Its triage capabilities are, however, intriguing for my email organization use-case. The concept of reverse spam-filters to increase find-ability and relevance certainly talks to my workflow.
Right now though, neither are obviously an order of magnitude better than bog-standard Gmail for me. With a curated document system, and having a perfectly decent search function should I ever need it, I feel comfortable that Gmail is just fine as it is, and that filing continues to be futile. For me, at least. And for now. Let’s be honest, it’s only a matter of time before I cave-in and request my Hey! login to experiment.
Jen Manning | Go-to-Market Blog and Services 