Microsoft Outlook works for you, not the other way around. Never let yourself become a slave to your inbox.
“Just digging through e-mail” is yet another thing staff officers say that commander’s don’t. As we’ve established, only slobs feel the need to announce the high numbers of e-mails they receive. In fact, we’ve all worked with people who compete over it, as if that’s a reflection of one’s importance or effectiveness.
E-mail is the reality in which we live, but it shouldn’t be a burden and it’s definitely not an excuse for poor or missed communication. If your e-mail accounts are managing your day, then chances are you need to upgrade your work habits:
- Know the top place you’ll run into important people, and have a useful reason to be physically present at that place are least once each day. For us, that’s the hallway outside the JOC, frequented by senior leaders, their aides and admins, and other players on their way to and from meetings. “Hey Dave, did you see that e-mail about such-and-such?” … “Not yet, but let’s talk about it right now. What’s up?” When you get back to your desk, many of your e-mails will have been actioned and rendered irrelevant.
- Abolish your fancy hierarchy of .PST folders for various topics and senders. That’s right, you’ve invested hours dragging and dropping each e-mail into one of these folders … or creating new folders for unique subjects. And you’ve also invested hours hunting through these same folders, not sure if you filed that media query response you need to revisit under “Live Fire Death” or “Range 77” or “1 BN” or “1st Battalion” or “Fayetteville Observer” or “June 2010” or “06 2010” or “Media” or “Random” … or others. You need two folders in Outlook: “Respond” and “Archive” – because all that matters is whether or not you need to take an action. Beyond that, hit “search” in Outlook and find what you need within “Archive” in a matter of seconds. [If you’re feeling frosty, a third, “Read” folder is acceptable as long as you can keep it empty.
- Schedule time against the task. This is the most Lifehackery thing I hope I ever blog, so don’t make me repeat it. Get into work 15-20 minutes earlier and attack your e-mail with conviction. While others are just rolling into the lot, you’ll be launching into the day’s clear priorities, not fighting off drive-bys so you can sort through SITREPS. And if you’ve been out of the office for a week? Take a Sunday morning to empty that inbox; you’ll set yourself up for a painless Monday, and be home in time for church.
Important e-mail management tips from How Google Works, a MaxDis must-read:
“Clean out your inbox constantly. How much time do you spend looking at your inbox, just trying to decide which email to answer next? How much time do you spend opening and reading emails that you have already read? Any time you spend thinking about which items in your inbox you should attack next is a waste of time. Same with any time you spend rereading a message that you have already read (and failed to act upon).
“When you open a new message, you have a few options: Read enough of it to realize that you don’t need to read it, read it and act right away, read it and act later, or read it later (worth reading but not urgent and too long to read at the moment). Choose among these options right away, with a strong bias toward the first two. Remember the old OHIO acronym: Only Hold It Once. If you read the note and know what needs doing, do it right away. Otherwise you are dooming yourself to rereading it, which is 100 percent wasted time.
“If you do this well, then your inbox becomes a to-do list of only the complex issues, things that require deeper thought (label these emails “take action,” or in Gmail mark them as starred), with a few “to read” items that you can take care of later. To make sure that the bloat doesn’t simply transfer from your inbox to your “take action” folder, you must clean out the action items every day. This is a good evening activity. Zero items is the goal, but anything less than five is reasonable.
“Otherwise you will waste time later trying to figure out which of the long list of things to look at.”
(Photo by Senior Airman Curt Beach, DVIDS)
