Everyone loves the concept of “Inbox Zero.” The idea is easy: make it a priority to empty your email inbox every day. It feels great. I agree that it feels great. One member of the Get-it-Done Guy community said it’s how he knows he has control over his email.
I respectfully disagree that inbox zero means you have control over your email. You don’t control the content, the order, or the volume of email that arrives. Inbox Zero is basically a reactive strategy—it says that your inbox is so high priority that you should attend to everything in it every day. Since you don’t control the content, that means shifting your brain through several topics just to scan your inbox in a single session. The order you have to think about those topics is determined by the order messages arrive, not by the importance or relevance of the topic to you. Brains don’t do well with rapid, random context switching. You’re using up brainpower just in the process of triaging the whole inbox. This isn’t just a philosophical issues. In “The Power of Full Engagement” by Tony Schwartz cites research that we only have a certain amount of mental capacity between each sleep cycle. Your brain doesn’t care what you use it on. You can use it up triaging your inbox just as easily as you can use it actually doing good, high-quality work. When I’ve paid close attention, I’ve noticed that email saps my actual productivity.
The amount of your email is determined by others, and the amount of time it takes to scan your inbox is proportional to the amount of email they send. Unless you’re in a completely reactive job and the only people who email you are people whose agenda aligns with yours, taking your time to sort through their email can waste a lot of time. I get about 100 emails a day. If I spent as much as 30 seconds on each one, that would take up the equivalent of a month and a half a year. There’s simply no way that’s a productive use of time in aggregate.
I believe that an empty inbox just means you’ve ceded control of your thinking and priorities to everyone who emails you. They control the volume, order, and substance of your attention for the time you’re processing your email. It *feels good* to have an empty inbox, but it also feels good to gorge on Oreo ice cream cake. That doesn’t mean that Oreo ice cream cake is good for you, only that it feels good. Inbox Zero has the extra sugary bonus that since *some* email is an essential part of our job, it’s easy to believe (with no evidence at all) that therefore it’s useful to spend some time on *all* email.
Rather than striving for inbox zero, I advocate learning to identify the truly relevant emails very, very quickly, with an absolute minimum of cognitive load or context switching.
Hint: consider the concept of semantic priming. When you consider a topic (or even just a word), your brain unconsciously brings to mind associated concepts. I’m assuming that this is part of what happens to drain the mental energy that email drains. How would you use semantic priming to your benefit while processing your inbox?
Hint #2: Consider that humans find it easier to choose between 2 things than 3, and that the framing of a choice–e.g. the choice to read/respond to an email versus to ignore it–will dramatically change the amount of mental energy needed to process that email.
Hint #3: Consider the behavior of people who send mail. Contrast their pre-email behavior (stamps, envelopes, etc.) and post-email. What was different? Why? What implications does this have for responding to senders?
Excelent!
I have to get rid of more than 200 e-mails a day, every day, saturdays and sundays included.
First I use the webmail filters, unfortunately it sends about 5% of the good stuff to trash, then I spend 1/2 hour every day browsing through the ones that the spam filters did not get, and this is what I still have to solve: how to get rid of them without the risk of sending something good to trash.
Inbox 0 is a great concept, you just need to filter your inbox automatically first.
At work, I automatically sort my mail into three inboxes: Mail sent directly to me, Mail I’m cc’d on, mail blasts send to the whole org. I process the first to empty every morning, first thing. It allows me to set my priorities for the day. Three times during the day (at least that is what I shoot for), I scan and process e-mail.
At home, my inbox is a mess. It doesn’t really weigh down on me though. I use Google’s priority inbox. I get my priority box to empty every day. It’s usually <10 messages.
I skim my remaining mail box every day to look for things that need to be filtered. I purge older messages every couple months.
It works for me.
Stever,
This is a really good point. I strive for an empty in-box almost to the point of obsession. I spend hours a week Archiving and creating to-do tasks for later. If it’s not empty, I can’t sleep.
Do you know any GTD rehab programs
-Joshua
Certainly provoked an ah ha moment. Thank you so much. I do so much rapid switching on a day to day basis it’s no wonder I’m exhausted. It all makes perfect sense. I’ll be getting that book.
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Thanks for sharing your knowledge with me and perhaps those you send to.I love your work Steve….it`s Awesome!
Stever, you’re absolutely right to advocate “learning to identify the truly relevant emails very, very quickly, with an absolute minimum of cognitive load or context switching.” However, I also think that this needs one more ingredient to make processing email really productive. This “ingredient,” believe it or not, brings us back to Inbox Zero–perhaps not daily, but weekly– from a different angle. Let me explain.
The core question is: What do we use the email inbox for? In my own productivity coaching work, I advocate the use of the email inbox NOT as a Task List, but simply as a gathering point of emails that need be processed. There is another place for Tasks; what that is depends on what tools one uses. Could be Outlook tasks, or Google tasks, or Bizpad tasks or whatever. Whatever (tool) one uses for a Task List, there should be only one Task List; it may structure tasks into categories, etc. but there shouldn’t be multiple places where we look for tasks to perform or schedule.
The point is: the Email Inbox should not be used as a Task List. Which brings us back to the Inbox Zero: if the Email Inbox is a place to simply gather email messages, we need to process it and (now your quick identification comes in) decide what to do with each email. There are just a few possibilities: Some emails get deleted right away. Some emails need immediate action (these are those we very quickly identify as needing and requiring quick action. Some emails become Tasks that get placed on a task list, but not scheduled yet. And some emails need be scheduled on our Calendar.
To summarize: I advocate the use of the Email Inbox as a place where unprocessed emails show up. I advocate regular processing of emails in the Inbox, which means deciding which category each message belongs to (see above for the 4 category) and taking the quick action. And yes, I advocate bringing the Email Inbox to zero once a week, mainly because it does not make any sense to keep stuff in an unprocessed state for too long. (It’s like food: if it’s kept unprocessed (uncooked) for too long, it gets stale).
Thoughts?
Thank you!
Sergiu
While I agree that we need to traige our email, there’s simply no getting around the fact that triage itself takes real mental energy. Check out The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz, where he discusses the research that we have a limited amount of mental processing power between sleep cycles. For me, half an hour of email triage leaves me drained and much less effective at other tasks. That means that any sort of triage where my brain must switch contexts and evaluate over and over simply isn’t a good solution for more than a few emails. But other people may be different.
This is a serious business cost! If I were paying someone’s salary who spent an hour a day on email, I would be seriously concerned about whether the five weeks a year they’re spending on email is actually a good investment of the salary and benefits I’m paying them. Even when “them” is “me.”
Hi Stever, I think we’re mixing two topics here: [#1] the processing of email that has arrived in our email inbox vs. [#2] the managing and protecting what emails make it to our email inbox.
On [#1]: yes, I believe we must spend the mental energy processing what’s arrived in our email inbox, and regularly (my practice is once a week) bring it to empty (the original topic of this conversation).
On [#2]: This is a related, but very different matter. This is where using various tools and techniques comes in, and it’s critical. Examples include (and not limited to): use of private email addresses we provide ONLY to known parties, use of email filters (such as SpamArrest and many others) with approvals, use of spam filtering software or services, use of virtual assistants to pre-scan emails, use of rules (such as in Outlook) for automated moving, removing or achiving emails as they arrive into the inbox, etc., etc. Some tools and techniques are more effective than others, and which one to use largely depends on one’s business situation.
Bottom line: The way I see it, if [#2] is done properly and well-matching one’s specific situation, then [#1] is simply part of the (mental) cost of doing business.
I cannot see any way around the above for any info worker in 2011 and beyond. BTW, you can also substitute “voice mail” and “SMS” and “IM” and whatever other means of asynchronous communication means one uses in one’s business wherever I said “email” and it all applies.
Thoughts?
(I’ll see if I can change my username to Stever, but I believe it’s hardcoded in WordPress to be Admin.)
I agree with your analysis except to point out that paper mail and voicemail had a cost to the sender, in money and time respectively. Furthermore, voicemail could be limited by the receiver to 30 seconds. Email (and IM) makes it free for people to flood you, and imposes no limits on the flooding. That’s the critical difference in my mind.
My objection is to people being slaves to their email. I see people all over spending hours a day on email, convinced they’re being productive. I watch how they spend their time and how it links to their actual work results and cringe. Much of the email time just isn’t productive, as measured by “does the time and mental energy required by this activity pay off in requisite job output results?”
On an unrelated small item: Stever, your responses come as signed by “admin”. Perhaps you need to log into the blog site as Stever?
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Stever,
I do agree that an empty inbox does concede control over to those who email us, however, for me the benefit of starting the next day clean, outweighs the loss of control I have.
I like the fresh feeling each morning…some people unclutter their desks, for me this isn’t a big deal. I do like a clean email though….
I do appreciate your tips, as I will strive to prioritize more, in order to be able to delete those unnecessary emails without being compelled to read them….
Stever, I’m a fan of yours. But I’m not with you yet on this topic. I think perhaps I’m missing part of your message. It seems as if you’re suggesting emails get left unprocessed indefinitely??
I’m all for shrinking the inbox size by unsubscribing, sending fewer, using filters, etc. But I think most executive positions practically require spending an hour a day processing email. Even though this time is not optimal (because of all the switching), it is essential…because of all the business conducted via email (& business lost if email isn’t fully processed or follow-up tasks minded).
And when you allow the emails to pile up so you can process in batches, then I think the switching cost is reduced. For instance, you can sort by conversation, read the latest & delete all the back & forth messages you missed when you were working.
There are certainly instances where using your “pretend they’re all deleted & look for the gold technique” is very useful. But day-to-day, I think processing is a necessary evil.
Thanks for forcing me to clarify my thinking. I believe in scanning you email once or twice a day and pulling out the truly important email. But scanning it in a way that takes as little time and mental switching as possible. Furthermore, putting as many hurdles as possible in the way of prospective senders so they would prefer to pick up the phone and call.
Ideally you want to train people NOT to use email with you except for the very few things that it’s really efficient for. (Efficient: sending reference information, collaborative documents, etc. Inefficient: having conversations.)
An hour a day is almost 2 months of work a year. If you’re a $120,000/year executive, that’s $20,000 worth of time you’ve spent on email. If I were paying that salary as the owner of a company, I would be very concerned about whether I’m getting my $20,000 worth out of that time use.
Richard Branson ran Virgin for years without using email (or so I heard him say in an interview a couple of years ago). It’s possible and was the standard way to run a business prior to 2000. The time most people spend on email results in their attention being pulled from one thing to another. Furthermore, I type 120 words a minute and that’s still slower than I talk. In the time it’s taking me to write this response, I could have said three times as much in a phone call.
Here’s what I suggest: * Scan your inbox for prospect and/or client emails. Pull those out and make a to-do list to get back to those people. Better yet, have an assistant call them all and schedule time to talk by phone. * For random colleague interaction, insert a cost in both time and if possible, money, to your email interactions. Then people will have at least some incentive to self-censor, batch their conversations with you, call by phone, etc.
My email signature line says “If it’s important, call me. Email is not a reliable way to reach me.” And I’m completely serious about that. And most people discover that it’s not important enough to call. And if it’s not important enough to call, it’s not important enough for me to use the slow medium of email to read and write. I make exceptions for people who are going to pay me money and for the other people in my business.
(This applies to social media, too. I’m very clear that my social media time is PR/marketing time, and I treat it accordingly.)
I agree that the emotional goodies that one gets from the Zero Inbox aren’t all that important, and are misleading for a variety of factors –e.g. my “high” might come from an overloaded Inbox that tells me how important I am in the world. So much for solely emotional evidence!
However, that doesn’t take away from the hard benefits of processing every message that you get in an efficient way that allows you to remove it from the Inbox, and from your “attention.”
Three points:
1. Many of the valid/non-spam email messages that you receive include time demands embedded in them. Therefore, each one must be “processed” (not necessarily “read”) so that important time demands don’t end up falling through the cracks, or fail to reach my attention in a timely way.
In work done at 2Time Labs, I have come to view the Inbox as a buffer for time demands. Or, in other words, like a kitchen sink, which is a buffer for dirty dishes and old scraps of food.
A kitchen sink is best viewed as a temporary place for storage. So is an email Inbox. Each item needs to be “processed” in a way that leaves the sink empty, not because it feels good…. but for other practical reasons. Something similar applies to the Inbox. It also needs to be emptied of time demands, and returned to its original empty state of being an efficient “capture point” for new time demands embedded in even more email.
I like to think of the Zero Inbox as going from Zero to Zero… starting with it empty, downloading email manually, and then processing each item until it’s empty once again.
Most of us actually manage our PO Boxes or mailboxes for snail mail in the same way… from Zero to Zero each and every day. (There is lots of research in queuing theory to prove the efficiency of this kind of batch processing… more than I can remember… or pretend to have understood at some point – LOL!)
2. The deeper point is that email isn’t the problem. If email were to magically disappear tomorrow we could continue to transmit time demands via other media… Fbook, Twitter, SMS, phone calls, IM’s, snail mail, telegram… whatever. The number of time demands that need to be communicated wouldn’t fall. Each one might get wrapped up with more or less words, but the core number would probably remain the same if the jobs were no different.
The problem, then, isn’t email. Our ancestors probably complained about the number of snail mails they received from pesky colleagues sitting in the next cubicle… “couldn’t they just come over and talk to me???” They also didn’t have much control over who sent them letters, and how many.
The problem lies in our methods, which are simply unsuitable for the volume of messages (and time demands) that we get in 2011. Filters help. Un-subscribing from newsletters helps. Deleting emails with no time demands helps, even without reading them. Telling people NOT to use email to communicate urgent “anything” has become a requirement in today’s workplace.
If the opposite of the Zero Inbox is an Inbox with 40,000 emails that include all sorts of time demands waiting to blow up in our faces… well… that’s not a solution. (I believe the comments you made to the questions asked went a long way in clarifying your original post.)
3. When your sink is empty it’s easier to pay attention to the single dirty glass that someone puts in it 5 minutes later. The same applies to email — we regularly abuse our Inboxes by not treating them like kitchen sinks, and instead turning them into “storage spots.” This creates problems as our attention isn’t focused on the last batch of email delivered, but on all the time demands that are lurking in the pile.
And you’re right — it takes energy to process the time demands in email… AND those in IM’s, phone calls, snail mail etc. That’s life. The only way to avoid this part of a job is to quit.
You said: “Rather than striving for inbox zero, I advocate learning to identify the truly relevant emails very, very quickly, with an absolute minimum of cognitive load or context switching.”
I think some of us are trying to persuade you that the goal of inbox zero /Zero Inbox is accomplished in part by executing the steps you describe in the second part of the statement — there might be no conflict.
I agree that people who reach Inbox Zero by very quick, low-context switching methods are, indeed, in complete agreement with me. My concern is that I routinely have coaching clients tell me they spend hours each day in front of email, trying to reach Inbox Zero. There’s just no universe in which that makes sense to me as a productive use of time.
By the way, as someone who dates back to the prehistoric days of paper memos, I can assure you that people in the next cubicle almost never sent memos. They stopped by to talk. And the cost (physical effort of writing, stamps, etc.) of sending hardcopy caused people to self-censor and think out their issues to a much greater degree than they do today.
True – the ease of sending email causes a greater volume of “ping-pong games” – as if emails were just like IM’s.
People who spend hours trying to get to Inbox Zero aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong are they? It all depends on what they are doing to get there.
If they are wasting time, then that’s obviously unproductive.
If they are writing sensitive emails to prevent a project from being cancelled, then that’s productive.
Perhaps the mistake they make is to focus on the goal of Zero Inbox and to ignore the quality of their email processing. But spending several hours communicating via email isn’t bad, per se… IMHO!
Stever, I love you.
I only sort-of follow the Inbox Zero approach. I’ve also adopted and now follow religiously the following rules:
1. Do NOT send a “finished!” email. It just starts a terrible thread of a “thank you” reply, which you then feel obligated to send a “you’re welcome” email. Save it for the water cooler.
2. If the email takes longer than 60 seconds to figure out what the problem is, pick up the phone. I get a TON of these horrible, long conversation, multiple-replies emails where I have to read from the bottom of the email up to figure out what’s going on. It’s disgusting and a colossal waste of time. When I get one of those emails, I pick up the phone and call the sender and ask them to brief me because the email is simply too confusing. 2 minutes later I usually have the problem solved with that quick phone call and I can trash the email that probably never should have been sent in the first place.
3. If replying is going to take longer than 3 minutes to type, pick up the phone. Sometimes a reply is too complicated or difficult to explain via email. Sure, I can fire up Skitch or SnagIt and attach screen shots, but what I’m really doing is spending 20 minutes on an email when a 5 minute phone conversation will not only solve the issue, but also be able to provide instant feedback.
4. Check email x times a day, and NO MORE THAN THAT. This was the toughest. I made an announcement to my team that I check my email first thing in the morning, then I check it right after lunch, and that is IT. If they need something from me sooner than those two times a day, please call me. It took months of reminding people that I only check my email twice a day, but as people slowly got into the habit of calling me for their instant needs, my email inbox shrank down to about 100 emails a day.
The good news about this: it’s incredibly easy to get my coworkers on the phone. For some crazy reason, they seem to think that email is the only way of communicating with each other. I called a coworker who was audibly shocked that I called her. When I asked her why, she told me that I was the first person to ever call her. She only got emails!
So while my inbox isn’t at zero, it’s being managed and is under control.
Stever, did I channel enough of your past podcasts in this comment? I can still hear in my head your voice saying “pick up the phone!”