Make Email Less Horrendous

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Tyler Sticka — Leave a Comment

Email is an amazing tool. It’s often a company’s life blood, carrying vital life-giving information to every vital organ. It’s revolutionized the way we communicate and established patterns of conversation that flourish in all social media to this day.

Unfortunately, email is also awful. Little about it has changed since it was invented nearly 30 years ago, and it has aged poorly. There are no built-in mechanisms for prioritizing messages, no way to competently and assuredly maintain threads of conversation, no means of bestowing additional context upon a dialog. It’s also crazy insecure, basically unusable without some sort of spam and malware protection.

The quest to make email suck less is ongoing. Gmail introduced labels, automatic threading and fast search. Later, Google would attempt to replace email with the ambitious but difficult-to-use Wave. Xobni, a plugin for Outlook, imports recipients’ social networking profiles to lend valuable context to messages, a feature Microsoft embraced themselves in Outlook 2010.

Despite these improvements, email remains for most a beast that cannot be fed. In the immortal words of Twisted Sister, “we’re not gonna take it… anymore!!”

Embracing Your Inner Merlin Mann

The principles I’ll suggest are nothing new. In fact, I’ve shamelessly swiped them from 43folders creator Merlin Mann, specifically his Inbox Makeover and Inbox Zero articles. If you want pure, unadulterated Merlin goodness, you should grab a tasty spoonful of the source material. If you want to hear how I’ve applied these principles specifically to my workflow here at WE Studio D, read on!

Folders: You’re Doing It Wrong

In my extremely scientific research (looking over co-workers’ shoulders as they manage their inbox), I’ve noted three popular means of email organization.

The Project-Specific Archive Approach
Messages are kept in the inbox as long as they’re needed at-hand, after which they’re archived in a folder named for the relevant project or client. This makes it easy to find messages related to a particular context, but that only helps you later. Day to day, tracking down emails and filing them away is slow and tedious.

The Godzilla Inbox Approach
Organization isn’t even attempted. Email is so difficult to track down anyway, you’ve simply given up  and embraced a colossal pile of communication. Messages older than a few weeks are lost to the ether, unless a keyword search bears fruit (which is rare).

The Frankenstein Approach
You tried Project-Specific Archives, you really did. But somewhere along the line, your inbox became too much. Your combination of half-heartedly maintained folders and a monolithic inbox have sapped what little hope you had left for finding anything. Even when you think you’re caught up on email, your inbox unread count mysteriously remains.

Now Is More Important Than Then

The problem with all of these methods of organization is that they put way too much emphasis on finding your email later, when you should really focus on identifying immediate actions.

In accordance with Merlin’s Inbox Makeover article, I immediately move every email I receive out of the inbox and into an action folder after a brief skim. This protects me from workflow disruptions and insures that my inbox remains tidy and true to its name; a place for incoming messages that have yet to be whisked to a more appropriate location.

When I receive an email, it is promptly moved into one of the following folders:

Action
For items that require some sort of action or task on my part before I can respond.

Archive
For items that require no action, or the action has already been completed, but you don’t want to completely delete the message. This folder will usually be your largest.

Hold
For items I’ll want close at hand in the next week or so (login information, URLs, attachments, etc.).

Respond
For items requiring a short message from me without any major tasks or required research.

Waiting
For items which will likely require action once the sender has responded.

There are many benefits to this folder structure. First, it insures messages that require your attention now are separated from those you maybe, sort of, kind of, might look at someday. Second, it allows you to tackle correspondance as an action item in and of itself. Firing off a response to an email message may seem like a 30-second task, but cumulatively those little tasks can eat away at your productivity and disrupt your creative flow. Having a “Respond” folder allows you to consolidate your responding time so that it’s just another action item, freeing your mind to work sans interruption.

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

For me, having a simple Archive folder is enough. I find that search functionality in email applications as evolved to the point where I don’t need various project-specific directories. Frankly, I don’t think it’s worth the time it takes to achieve that level of organization.

For many, though, this transition may be a little too radical. If you’re afraid to drink the Kool-Aid, let me propose a small compromise. Create subfolders underneath Archive so you have smaller buckets inside the large bucket. Problem solved!

Why are we doing this again?

Because email is a beast, a sickly mutant beast that eats at your productivity and requires specialized care no matter how you access it. This is what it takes to make me happy with it.

For more information on wrangling your inbox, I highly recommend the aforementioned Merlin Mann articles. You may also want to read my personal blog post (which this post is loosely based on) for how I apply these same techniques to my personal email and other technologies.