Five Fast Email Productivity Tips

From Sil­i­con Val­ley Watcher

Be fast. Be pro­duc­tive. Be cool.

Five Fast Email Pro­duc­tiv­ity Tips

There’s been a lot of great dis­cus­sions about email pro­duc­tiv­ity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.

Shut off auto-check — Either turn off auto­matic check­ing com­pletely, or set it to some­thing rea­son­able, like every 20 min­utes or so. If you’re doing any­thing with new email more than every few min­utes, you might want to rethink your approach. I’m sure that some of you work­ing in North Korean mis­sile silos need real-time email updates, but I encour­age the rest of you to con­sider gang­ing your email activ­ity into focused (maybe even timed) activ­ity every hour or three. Process, tag, respond to the urgent ones, then get the hell back to work. (See also, NYT: You There, at the Com­puter: Pay Attention)

Pick off easy ones — If you can retire an email with a 1–2 line response (< 2 min­utes; pref. 30 sec­onds), do it now. Remem­ber: this is about action, not about cog­i­tat­ing and fil­ing. Get it off your plate, and get back to work. On the other hand, don’t per­mit your­self to get caught up in com­pos­ing an unnec­es­sary 45-minute epis­tle (see next item).

Write less — Stop imag­in­ing that all your emails need to be epic lit­er­a­ture; get bet­ter at just keep­ing the con­ver­sa­tion mov­ing by respond­ing quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more infor­ma­tion, pose a ques­tion, or just say “I don’t know.” Stop try­ing to be Vic­tor Hugo Mar­cel Proust, and just smack it over the net—especially if fear of writ­ing a long reply is what slows your response time. N.B.: This does not mean that you should write ellip­ti­cally or bypass stan­dard gram­mar, cap­i­tal­iza­tion, and punc­tu­a­tion (unless you want to look 12 years old); just that your well-written mes­sage can and should be as con­cise as pos­si­ble. That saves every­one time.

Cheat — Use some­thing like Mail­Tem­plate to help man­age answers to fre­quent email sub­jects. Tem­plates let you cre­ate and use boil­er­plate responses to the ques­tions and requests to which you usu­ally find your­self draft­ing iden­ti­cal replies over and over from scratch. At least use a tem­plate as a basis for your response, and then cus­tomize it for that per­son or sit­u­a­tion. Don’t worry—you can still let your sparkling prose and win­ning wit shine through, just with­out hav­ing to invent the wheel 10 times each day.

Be hon­est — If you know in your heart that you’re never going to respond to an email, get it out of sight, archive it, or just delete it. Guilt will not make you more respon­sive two months from now, oth­er­wise, you’d just do it now, right? Trust your instincts, lis­ten to them, and stop try­ing to be perfect.