I can't get any more succinct than the headline – email is awful, horrible, annoying, time-consuming, and inefficient. We waste countless hours of our business lives (don’t even get me started on our personal ones) managing something that was never really meant to be what it is now – a daily barrage of invasions, hindrances, interruptions, requests, announcements, confirmations, advertisements, invitations, alerts, irritations, scams, polemics, and - perhaps worst of all - baby pictures.
Okay, I'm kidding about the baby pictures; after all, those are mostly relegated to Facebook and Instagram these days. But the fact remains that email long ago got out of hand, and there’s no end in sight. You might as well add it to the inevitability of death and taxes; we will all likely go to our graves with the knowledge that thousands of unread messages are sitting in our inboxes, nagging to be acted upon.
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And that's really the thing that makes email so troublesome: each message is, at least in a business environment, a thing that we have to deal with. Unless you have a radically efficient method of dealing with email, or just a handful of customers and vendors, you’ve likely turned your inbox into a big, disorganized to-do list, whether you realize it or not.
For most of us this creates stress. We feel like we should be dealing with what’s requested of us, but the speed with which email arrives creates unrealistic expectations of when those things might actually need to be done. Everything about email, in fact, is designed (at least superficially) to replicate actual mail – from the little envelope icons to inboxes and folders to the terminology (cc, bcc, etc.), email is a derivative of the letters we used to send to each other back in previous centuries (it’s telling that my teenage daughter thinks email itself is primitive and annoying).
Think about that a little bit more – when you got a letter (if you're old enough to remember actually getting letters), it often sat on your desk or in your inbox for at least a day or two before you even read it, much less responded. Immediacy was not mail’s strong suit, which is why alternatives eventually flourished, from FedEx to pagers to Blackberries.
We now manage most of our communication with something that mimics the trappings of old-school snail mail but demands immediate attention, all day long. And it comes in barrages of messages, many tied to other messages, all creating a mountain of frustration that has forced some folks to periodically declare “email amnesty” and just delete their entire inbox and start over.
Most of us can’t afford to start with a clean slate, but there are a few things you can do to reduce the unmitigated pain and suffering that is business email. Here are a few suggestions worth exploring – some of them may be so obvious as to seem boneheaded, but the simplest solution is often the best: Turn It OFF!
You may think email is an immediate communication medium that demands nearly-instant review and response; in reality, it wasn't designed for that, and that's why it's such a pain when it's managed that way. The single best way to better manage email is to segment it the way you would anything else. For instance, you probably don’t make yourself available to anyone and everyone all day long every day; I'm guessing you take lunch breaks, have meetings, go to the bathroom, and you might even shut your door and concentrate on getting something done every now and then.
You should treat email the same way: turn it off sometimes! If you really don't think you can do this at all, I've got a story for you. I once had a woman working for me who was a constant ball of stress because of the volume of client email she received all day long, all of which was, at least according to the clients, incredibly important! But she spent so much time managing email that she couldn't actually get any project management done. And she didn't feel comfortable not responding to clients in a timely manner.
I gave her two suggestions. First, come in before your clients really start emailing you and work through as much project management as you can. Second, once the day heats up and the emails really start pouring in, only deal with them once every half hour or every hour. That's right – just shut the email client down for half an hour and get your other work done. Any client who needs an answer to a question in less than half an hour should call you anyway!
It worked beautifully for her. She was able to manage client expectations much more successfully, and her sanity returned. All it took was the willingness to shut the email client down for part of the day. Most of us have a hard time doing this because we fear that we’ll miss something, make someone angry or forget something important. But if you've got customers who can't wait half an hour for you to respond to them, consider telling them to use the phone!
Reduce It
If you're like me, you've likely got anywhere from a dozen to a 1,000 email lists that you're subscribed to that probably don't add a lot of value to your life. You might even produce email content for your customers or clients that they subscribe to which, when it really comes down to it, may not add an enormous amount of value to their lives either.
Your willingness to cut out some or all of these subscriptions will reap benefits for your sanity. I know what you’re thinking: if I unsubscribe from the Widgets USA newsletter, I might not get notified the next time there’s a sale on widgets! Believe me, I’ve been there. But when you factor in the amount of time you waste the rest of the year looking at those widget emails, that $5 off coupon doesn’t look like such a good deal.
You don't have to cut out everything, but reducing email subscriptions is a lot like cleaning out your closet – if you can throw out that tie you haven’t worn in five years, you can probably live without the daily widget newsletters and still have a clean conscience. And you know what? If you really miss that tie, you can always go buy another one, just like you can always go to Widgets USA and subscribe again. I'd wager that a month later you won't even remember half of the things you unsubscribed from.
Summarize It
There are a number of services that offer email consolidation, bulk unsubscribes and other features to help you manage too much email. My favorite is Unroll.me, which gives you two amazing features: one-click unsubscribe and "rollups." One-click unsubscribe sounds trivial until you let Unroll.me go through your inbox and see the full list of your subscriptions (often hundreds). A single click enables you to unsubscribe to any of them.
The second feature is even better: Unroll.me will take all the subscriptions you select and put them into a single daily digest email for you. You can glance over this email to make sure you aren't missing out on any incredible widget deals. Every email is clickable, so if you need to act on the latest widget offer, you're free to do so. But if you're like me, most days you’ll give it a quick look over and then toss it. Now that's good email management.
Brent Buford is a co-founder of eBlox, a Tucson, AZ and Austin, TX-based web development firm. He can be reached at brent@eblox.com.