Getting a handle on your email could improve your productivity for 28% of your business day. (Gregor... [+]
Welcome to your New Year's Revolutions: small but life-affecting changes you can make using technology.
We're going to start where most people need help: your email, and one tip that may help reduce the time you spend staring at subject lines.
Workers spend an average of 14% of their workday responding to email, according to a 2014 Workfront survey, and that number rises to as high as 28% for knowledge workers, according to a 2012 McKinsey & Company report.
It's one of the largest sources of interruption for modern office workers. People may boast of their multitasking skills, but studies suggest that they're actually performing serial tasks quickly, and paying a performance hit each time.
Various studies estimate that email and other electronic interventions take us off-task every 3 to 11 minutes. Gloria Mark at the University of California-Irvine showed that most people take about 23 minutes to get fully back on task once interrupted.
The math isn't good.
Even if you take the plunge and commit to only checking email every so often, you're still dealing with a hodge-podge of messages covering a variety of topics and requirements. Disposing of them may require a dozen different actions: replies, calendar entries, to-do items, permanent archiving, waiting for a response and so on.
The revolution: consistently group email together by time, by topic and by action needed.
Addressing email in chunks means less interruption, so begin by waiting as long as you can to deal with email messages together. If you have Gmail and lack willpower or need access to stored messages to do your other work and keep getting distracted by new mail, consider an app like Inbox Pause.
Next, start using your email client's filtering rules to pluck messages out of your inbox and file them together: by topic or by who sent them, for example.
Recurring messages such as system updates or electronic newsletters should always be filtered into whatever label or folder makes sense, since by definition those messages aren't urgent. Make sure you're you're creating filters that move them out of your inbox when they arrive, so they won't just be labeled--they'll be out of sight.
Broad categories are good. Instead of filtering each newsletter you receive into its own label or folder, put them all together by topic--shopping, industry news and so on--or into a large Newsletters label.
All messages from coworkers that come to your personal email addresses could be filtered into a single place. (If you're truly worried about missing that note from your boss, forward it to your phone's primary email account or SMS email address to get immediate attention.)
Next, consider investing in a tool that will allow you to flag the action you need from an email directly within the list. Most of the to-do list apps discussed here so far will allow that.
If you're a Chrome user with Gmail, also consider Sortd, which adds a handy taskbar right on the side of your mailbox to keep track of email you'll want to return to later, sorted into to dos, followups and custom lists of your choice. That way, you can touch it and deal with it once, instead of leaving it in your inbox to remind yourself to deal with it later.
We can all use a little spit and polish on our email handling. What better time of year to wrestle that inbox monster to the ground? Take a few minutes to clean up your email act and you'll be on a revolutionary track for 2016.
