Send less email; be more productive.
Surely I’m not the only one who hates dealing with email.
I find the constant flow of messages from other people asking me to do things exhausting. While I know it’s a necessary part of my workflow, I still find myself procrastinating email, yet still worrying about my late responses while I’m trying to focus on other (more productive) things.
Email has a false sense of urgency.
It’s what Cal Newport calls a “shallow” activity in his book, Deep Work. I highly recommend this read for anyone interested in productivity and increasing their time spent doing deep, honest, difficult work. He discusses the challenges with email in more depth. After reflecting on his ideas, here are two things I’ve recently adopted to do email better:
(1) Only respond if you have something important or productive to say
Before you send an email, ask yourself: “is this email really necessary?”. I get frustrated by email responses that say something to the effect of, “great, I’ll get this to you by xxx time”. Unless the previous email asked for a response regarding the time you’ll respond to the email, this is simply just a waste of an email. This type of email accomplishes nothing yet still fills our inboxes with extra messages that we eventually need to go through. It takes time and energy to deal with each email. How can you minimize the amount of emails you send to your colleagues?
Rather than email to tell me you’re going to do something, just hold off and email me once it’s finished or dealt with. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you haven’t been able to deal with it (and that’s okay! We are busy and stretched too thin and over loaded with work (and email!). It’s okay not to respond right away). Give yourself permission not to respond to an email if it isn’t urgent. If it’s truly urgent, you’ll know right away OR get a follow up email.
(2) Stop apologizing for your “delayed response”
I do this so often that I feel like the words don’t even mean anything anymore. By some people’s standards, my email responses are always delayed (because they aren’t immediate!). Women, myself included, seem to be particularly prone to this, apologizing for things unneccessarily. “I’m sorry for my delayed response”, they say. Reminder: you don’t need to apologize for being productive in your job and life in a way that kept you from responding to this less-than-urgent email. I trust that you had a good reason not to respond to my email right away.
Remember: life happens in between email.
As soon as you realize this, the false urgency of email starts to fade away.
For those of us who’d like to acknowledge their slow response to email (this is the story of my email life), consider this phrase:
“Thank you for your patience in awaiting my reply.”
In my opinion, this positive spin on the same idea is a whole lot better than “sorry for my delay”. Since I saw this recommended on twitter, I’ve adopted into my email workflow and I’m glad I did. Most people respond with, “no worries!” or “not a problem!”. You shouldn’t need to apologize for the chaotic, dynamic workings of your daily life that may not allow for you to respond to email the second you get it.
Coming to peace with my email inbox is a constant progression for me. Some weeks I’m really good at keeping up with it and find myself at inbox zero regularly. Other weeks, I’m bogged down and paralyzed at the thought of sending even the simplest emails. Why is this? I’m still trying to figure it out.
But for me, I’m trying to prioritize more important things than email: academic writing, teaching preparation, reading, thinking, and synthesizing ideas. I’m in the business of coming up with novel, compelling ideas. Email is not a productive avenue towards that goal. I’m always looking for ways to spend less time doing thing that do not move me towards my career goals (like email) and more time time doing things that do (like writing). While email is a necessary tool, I find I’m more productive when I let the emails fly into my inbox without notification. I’m okay with putting some of the less important ones off for a few days. It’s not out of rudeness, but out of fierce protection of my time and where it goes.
We could all do better to send less email and give our colleagues time to think deeply, work meaningfully, and get things done. How do you deal with the constant onslaught of emails? I’d love to hear from all you email savvy folk, but please, don’t send me an email.
