Works for MeThis week, Francesca takes on the bane of every corporate worker’s existence: email. Drowning in email and regularly missing important messages, she attempts to attain inbox zero through rigorous discipline.
What do you think about my general presence on email? I would say you're not the best of email. I just think you missed things. Sometimes. The problem with you and sending emails is that it's very unpredictable when you will read, if you will read, and when you will reply. First time I met you, I was introduced to you. You gave me your business card and said here, this is my email if you need to get in touch, and so literally like that night, I emailed you and said, hey, it was nice to meet you. Here are some things that would be helpful, and I never heard back. Once I sent an email saying, hey, I really want to go to this conference. I need to sign up for it by Friday and it's Wednesday. Do you think I can do it? And I kind of forgot about it, and then I didn't hear back from you. So by the time that we did get around and discussing it, it was the next week I didn't get to go. So more often than not, I just wander over and talk to you. Definitely no to harass you on chat, and if all else fails to engage with you in person, and then I guess if that if if you're still am I, I might go to to your boss, where would you say I rank and like among all the people you work with? Am I like the worst about email? Or am I? Am I in the middle? Or am I close to the bottom. I don't think you're at the very bottom, but you're near the bottom if we're being honest. So what you just heard was a bunch of my colleagues totally dissing my email habits. I knew I wasn't great an email, but I didn't realize I was making everyone else's lives that much harder. This week on Works for Me, I try to fix it. Um. Welcome to Works for Me, the show where we improve ourselves using productivity hats to see if they'll work for you. I'm back at Greenfield, and I'm Francesca leaving. This week it is Francesca's turn to change something about the way she works. Francesca, what's bothering you about your productivity? This week? I'm bad at email, Like, very, very very bad at email. My work inbox is so overwhelming that I'm drowning in it. I actually miss emails that are pretty important. I just won't see them because of all the other stuff that comes in and when I do spot a relevant email and open it and read it, I don't actually have a good system for handling and dispatching each email quickly. So I'm hearing two problems. One is that your inbox is overwhelming, which is a problem a lot of us have. My work email is certainly like that. My personal email is definitely more under control. Congratulations, thank you. But then the other problem I'm hearing is that you haven't figured out how to thrive in this chaos. I basically avoid it. I see the sheer number of emails and it scares me and I go burrow under a rock, which is a problem since email is a main form of communication for a better worse in our world. To be fair, I didn't get into this situational by myself. The modern workplace is in an email crisis. We're drowning in a deluge of email and jargon. The average corporate employee in this two thousand mind you received anywhere from fifty emails per day, and it's growing at about fifteen per year. So if you do the math, it would double every four and a half to five years. That's Phil Simon, a professor at Arizona State University. He wrote a book called Message Not Received, all about how the corporate world is crippled by too much email. He's not wrong. I live that problem. Um. I decided to sit down at home with my husband Mike and diagnose just how bad the problem had gotten. All right, so I'm gonna show you one day. One day is worth of email. Okay, So this is like there's twenty emails per page, So six pages, six times twenty unread well total emails? Is that something like all that that you haven't read? Yes? Or does this include spam email? I get a lot of pr um like public relations firms put you on mailing lists, So I have a lot of unwanted mailing list emails. So then why don't you just delete them if you know you're not going to read them? A good question? I mean, I mean I think I get overwhelmed because it's so much. Look how close these emails came in together, like to seven to one, so they just like they just come in like an avalianche checking your email. Right, I know, But I to make this workout have to be constantly deleting these exactly. That's how it works. If you go to lunch and come back to your desk and you haven't looked at it for thirty minutes, forty minutes, Um, how many new emails would it have, say, I would have like new emails. Yeah, I mean that's so that's why it's hard for me to delete. Yeah, but it sounds like there's also a lot of things that you're subscribed to that you should just unsubscribe because that's the same effect as deleting emails to these pr email spam. These are really insidious, Like these are the ones. I think that this is going to be the biggest challenge. This is the thing that I'm is going to be my um golies. Is that the right metaphor going to be my I don't feel like that's what I'm looking for, But it's gonna be my dragon to slay. It sounds like my custom hausom good advice for you, But my inbox definitely looks a lot like yours. That's a lot of unwanted things that I just don't deal with. That's actually kind of refreshing to hear, because I feel like you often have good hygiene about these things. Mike just too. I sometimes feel like I'm the only one who just doesn't do anything about these emails. Okay, so everybody is sending too many emails, it's not just you, but you sound like you have a pretty big problem here. You're getting a lot of emails, but you're also not responding to them quickly or at all. So how are you going to do that? I really wanted a solution that didn't require to use any new tech or install any apps system that anybody could use on any email software. So I'm going classic. I'm doing inbox zero. Well, in box zero, so that's like no emails in your inbox ever, right, It's actually pretty straightforward philosophy. It was developed all the way back in two thousand seven by Merlin Man. He's a writer, podcaster and productivity guy. And yeah, it's basically a filing system for your electronic mail. And just like it sounds, inbox zero dictates that you should end every day with an empty inbox, either deleted or filed into folders every single email you've gotten. That sounds like a lot of time spent on your email. And I think that's some of the criticism to inbox zero and systems like it, that's that it sets those really high expectation and bar for people that they have to do this really intense email maintenance every single day. Yeah, I think that in all of the years that inbox zero has been around as an idea, there's definitely been something about backlash to it, and that's part of it that it takes so much time, And people also say it's kind of a way of feeling productive without being productive, because you're just you're spending lots of time doing something, but what you're doing is just your email. So I get all those criticisms, and I do think there's a danger that I'll spend a lot of time on it, But I'm also I have to do something like I'm in an email emergency right now, so I think I've got to try the most extreme thing I know of. Okay, so you're going to become an inbox zero person. I'm excited for you and your transformation, But what's the exact system that you're going to follow to get to invox zero? First, I need to set up rules, including folders and filters on my email and even just telling people in various ways not to email me so much so I don't get as many emails in the future that step one. Next, I need to get rid of everything sitting in my inbox right now, which is a lot, and I don't know how long that will take. Finally, every day after that, I'm going to assign three twenty minute dashes where I can dedicate my self to allotting emails to their proper place. It seems like you have it all figured out. How will you know whether your experiment is a success. If I can spend one week and finish every day with an empty inbox, I've one. I've conquered my email problem. Good luck. Step one of inbox zero, make some rules. I was going to set up folders and filters and send a message to my colleagues that I am not an email person anymore. This was to try to lower the sheer number of emails that I was getting. First, I was going to set up some folders. I got the idea from a Fast Company article to make folders based on time, not by subject. So the folders I set up are called today, this week, this month, M, and F Y I. F Y I is where everything goes that you might need to reference later, but it doesn't require a response. I did other things to limit how many new emails. I got Phil, our email expert, had given me a tip if an email chain goes longer than three emails, it should move to another medium. So I put that rule in my email signature. This turned out to be harder than I expected. This feels crazy to put this in my even this to put this in my I for email chains longer than three emails, please call instead call her message instead. Oh this feels weird. All right, I'm going to save it. So it sounds like you're having a problem where you're thinking about other people more than yourself. Yeah, because you're scared that you're going to find someone with your email signature, when really you're doing it in service of being a better emailer and not because you're a mean person who hates everybody. No, that's true. I should have thought about it that way. And also, like, I'm making other people's lives harder right now with my emails. So even if I make their life momentarily more annoying because they have to read my somebody, Yeah, and that's okay, but not as much as I would upset somebody by not responding to their true I did a little more prep to set myself up for success. Once my inbox is clear, I signed emails from important people a special color in my inbox, so they showed up above the noise, and I saved tem blitz for the common emails I send out all the time. Okay, now it was time for step two, purging my inbox. I had done everything I could think of to slow down the barrage of emails I was getting, But now I had to tackle my real demon, my ridiculously over stuffed inbox. I had a year's worth of unread or undealt with or just irrelevant emails, thousands and thousands of them. So I did something radical and kind of controversial here, something that inbox zero recommends for some people called the email d m Z. What is the email d MZ? This is where you basically take a bomb to your inbox. I decided to wipe every email older than two months, just zap it gone. If it was important and I didn't respond, it was probably too late. Becca. Do you think you could do this? Delete hundreds of emails in one shot without even like checking on what they were. Yes, I am so on board for this. I've actually wrote an article about this one. I wrote an article about after you come back from a vacation to delete all the emails from before vacation. Just do it. There's no Yeah, like you said, if it's important, and I'll come back up again. And if you missed it two months ago, you've probably missed your window. Yeah. I think there's also a nagging fear that there's just something important in there, like not necessarily something I needed to respond to, but some crucial piece of information that I was going to delete and never find again. And I haven't tested whether that's actually true, but I suspect we I think we think that's true more than it actually is, Like we're not storing as much valuable gems of info in our email as we think we are. I wouldn't even know how to find it. I was ready to lift the weight of these thousands of emails off me. It was kind of scary, to be honest, just get rid of them all in one big select all swoop, you know what. I'm just I just gotta do it. This is crazy. I have thousands of emails in here, so I'm going to expand this window. Oh my god, this is nerve racking. Okay, am I really doing this? And I'm just gonna do. Oh my god, I have so many emails. I can't even understand. Oh I got here, Okay, here we go, shift click delete, delete, delete. But I immediately ran into a problem. Deleting the emails was not going to be a one click deal. Our email system doesn't actually have a select all function, so I could only select about twenty emails at a time. I was going to have to go through these screen by excruciating screen. This would take hours. Delete delete, shift click delete. I've been deleting, responding to an archiving emails for the last twenty minutes and I haven't even gotten past today. So I'm going to have to go home and pick it up again from home because this has to get done. This is a shocking amount of time. While I cleared the backlog, I also started in on the emails I had decided to save from the past two months, responding to archiving or deleting every single one. It took forever. I was at the office two hours late and I still wasn't done. To be honest, I was getting exhausted. I went home, kissed my sleeping kid, and got right back to my laptop. At around ten thirty that night, I was finally done, which is to say it took me around six hours just to delete old emails and respond to her file the ones that had come in the past a couple of months. I'm finally done. I'm done sorting through emails, deleting emails, categorizing emails, responding in to emails, and my inbox is empty. I feel tired. That took way way longer than I expected, even the deleting part, but I'm so glad I did. I feel I feel like more competent as a person and a worker and a manager just for doing that. It's an amazing way to go to bed, which I'm going to do right now because I'm really tired. And then my inbox was empty. I went to sleep, ready to start my new life as an empty inbox person. The question is what would happen when new emails started coming in find out after the break. The next day, I woke up feeling like a new person. I was free from all of those emails that had been dragging me down. I had spent the night before making sure my inbox was Christine. I walked over to my desk, opened up my laptop, and there they were dozens of new emails. I already had twenty two new pr spam emails alone. This was not going to be easy. It was time to solve the next big email problem. I had no system for dealing with emails quickly when they came in. I was done with steps one and two, make rules and purge my inbox. Now I needed to start on step three, keep it up. I decided on a simplified version of the steps. In Box zero lays out scheduling email dashes throughout the day, where you decide quickly whether to file, respond to, or delete every email. Since my folders would help me decide how quickly to respond to things, I'd go through my inbox three times a day for twenty minutes, and then check my folders daily, weekly, and monthly. My first email dash of the day was at ten am, and I had to deal with these mailing lists. I think every profession probably has their own special spam, and this is the kind journalists get. Becca. Let me read you some lines from these emails. I know you cover advertising business news, so I wanted to send this over to you right away so you have the full scoop. I don't cover advertising, and it wasn't a scoop? Or February is International Boost Self Esteem Month? Or is a nose job? A no note for your kid? Parental tips on team plastic surgery. I know you must get these two. How do you deal with them? Yeah? I think I even got some of those exact same emails. How do I deal with them? Ignore? I just let them glaze like I let my eyes glance over them and decide they're unimportant. It's the same way like when you have a mess in your house for long enough, you stop seeing it. Yeah. The reality of the situation is that itomb is important things, usually not from people I know, But I'll get pitched things that I probably should cover. But because I have my system involves me ignoring most emails, things fall through the trucks. Yeah. The worst thing about these types of emails is that sometimes even when you unsubscribe, it does nothing. Because I did try that at first. I spent about a day going and clicking on the little four point font way way way at the bottom of every email. But then I realized it wasn't working. I kept getting emails from the same senders, so I tried something more extreme. Our company software lets us block every email from a certain domain, so when i'd get an email from a list I knew I had already n subscribed from, they got blocked. It finally started to work, and the new emails I was getting slowed down. I also gingerly started trying to train people to send me fewer emails that email signature I had added about not sending chains longer than three emails. A colleague saw it and called me a hero. And one email threat that involved around twenty people and had gone on for more than twenty emails, I replied to it with a helpful link, explained that I couldn't add anything more to the conversation, and asked to be taken off the chain, and it worked. Meanwhile, I was responding to the relevant emails like a machine. I couldn't stand seeing my beautiful, pristine, empty email get cluttered, so when more than two or three emails built up, I panic and start responding. So I'm looking at around twelve new emails. I'm just gonna zip right through them. Okay, I am supposed to submit a podcast for an award. Why not let's submit, send it done, and I'm going to delete delete great, okay, An email to someone who reports to me, which I'm copied on, so I'm going to apply to that person. So I'm saying, Hi, please do this so I don't get any more emails about it. Send delete. I was getting really good at sponding and people were noticing. Listen to all my haters who were in the studio before, eat their words. Have you noticed any changes since I started doing endbox zero? I have It's like night and day. Um, I would say, now, I you get an email and you reply instantly in a way that I would never have expected you to do. You are on it like I have. There's some stuff where I haven't even gotten a chance to like open up the email until I see your replies. I feel as that you send out more emails now, and when you are a part of a group email that I'm also I've also been on, you respond with a little more gusto than you have in the past, just maybe an exclamation point here there, definitely faster within the day a few hours tops. Um, I've noticed that you have been replying to emails in a more consistent way. I even tested you. I saw you were heading to the students to record and I send you an email and it took twenty minutes to get back to me. So I'm great at email now, everybody agrees. But it turned out that there were downsides to my new email obsession. I was cheating on my dashes instead of sticking to my prescribed three twenty minute inbox sessions a day. I was glued to my inbox, dealing with emails constantly as they came in. If I stepped away from a meeting, I was itching to get back to my desk to clean up whatever new litter was coming in or worse, I sat in the meeting clearing emails on my phone. Keeping my inbox clear had become something of an addiction, and my co workers were noticing. One thing that's happened is that your zealous emailing has kind of been eating its way into the rest of your responsibilities on those In a meeting, we were talking and someone wanted your attention, and you were all, oh, I'm sorry, I just had to answer this email. That's true. I was answering an email and I wasn't listening to what she was saying in the meeting. He was right, I was getting distracted in meetings by my email and that's because by the end of the week, I had become an inbox zero person. I was totally transformed. That email flake my colleagues had been complaining about she was gone. I just love the look of that shiny, empty digital space, and I became addicted to keeping it that way. I confess I even started sneaking in sessions while I was at home with my family to do some quick email filing and deleting. The new me loves email. You sound like you really went through a transformation to someone who avoided emails to someone who was addicted to emails. Would you call all the experiment a success? Though, Yeah, I would. I did what I set out to do. I wiped my inbox constantly, and I never left the office with an unaddressed email. Would you recommend in box zero to other hopeless email cases like yourself. I can't unreservedly recommend it. It's true that being on top of your email workload feels great, and honestly, before I took stock of how bad my email habits where I didn't realize how much it was making other people's lives harder. That I wasn't being responsive. But there was no way I could stay on top of my emails without looking at my inbox virtually all the time, and that took time away from doing my real job, which it turns out is not professional email checker. With so many emails coming in, keeping your inbox empty is an uphill battle. And it did help to set lots of filters and block emails and keep some of that stuff from ever making it to my inbox, but it didn't eliminate the problem. Yeah, so we're back to the original problem of the workplace being in dated with emails and having this email problem. So what's the solution to that? Becca? I think you and I have to use our platform to make a plea to the corporate world. CEOs, managers, frontline workers. Please please let's all work together to stop sending so many emails. Just stop emailing when you know a call or chat message or in person talk would do the trick. Stop emailing just to make it look like you've gotten some work done. And please please stop spanning people with mailing lists. It's the only way we can manage our workloads. And I at least can stop passing my coworkers off. That is quite the impassioned to please, as somebody who also has an inundated inbox. I would much rather people stop emailing me than go on the inbox zero journey that you just experienced. But seriously, I am. I'm proud of you. You've gotten your work email under control. You must really feel like a new person. But I'm also wondering what about your personal email? Have you mastered that too? Not even close? Currently on my personal Gmail, I have let me check stand two hundred and forty four unready emails. That number is stressing me out. You look like you're about to die. Next week on Works for Me, it's our final episode of the season, we're going to update you on all of our experiments we've done so far and see if we've become productivity machines. Thanks for listening to the show. If you've tried any of our productivity experiments or have unresolved work problems you want to talk to us about, leave us a voicemail at two and to six one seven zero one and we might use your voice on the show, or you can tweeted us. I'm at Francisca today and I'm at RS Greenfield. If you like our show, please head on over to Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to rate, review and subscribe. This show was produced by two for Foreheads and written and reported by me Francisca Leavie and me Rebecca Greenfield. Find more great Works for Me stuff, including illustrations by Jordan Spear, on our show page bloomberg dot com slash Works for Me and Francesca Levy is Bloomberg's head of podcast. We'll see you next week. Bye,
