Email Management Tips

Pragmatic Marketing’s latest Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey indicates that product managers receive 50 emails per day and send 25. In my case, it’s about two to three times that. Regardless, that is a lot of email to process and a lot of replies to compose.

At one point a few years ago, I found myself with 300+ emails in my inbox that all appeared to be important and in need of my attention. It seemed pretty hopeless. This is when I decided that I needed to come up with a strategy for managing my email. I started asking everybody from my boss to my brother-in-law for ideas. I did additional research online and even read books on the topic. Over time, I implemented various ideas and figured out what worked and what didn’t work for me. 

This post embodies my findings and best-practices as it relates to managing email. At this point, I can generally get away with spending less than 30 minutes on email each day. I hope these tips will help you take control of your email and prevent it from taking over your life.

Process Email in Batch

This is the #1 rule for getting your life back from the clutches of email. Do you keep your email alerts on all day long? Does it distract you from meaningful work every five minutes? Do you look back at each workday and think, “All I did today was email…”? Look no further. There is an answer to your dilemma: Turn off your email. 

Schedule times during the day (I try to stick with three) when you plan to process your email. When you get to “email processing time,” turn on your email and go through the entire list and do something with each email:

1. Delete - do this if you don’t want to keep the email.
2. Archive - do this if you don’t want to read the email, but you may need it later.
3. Read and archive - do this if the subject indicates that it is important enough to read.
4. Complete action item and archive - do this if the email requires an action item and you have time to do it right away. For example, sending replies like “Yes,” “No,” and “All sales collateral is available on the intranet site.”
5. Create a task with a reminder and archive - do this if you have an action item, but you do not have time to do it right away. I maintain the following categories for action items:
   • Read/Review (print these out for the next plane ride)
   • Need to discuss (a phone call or meeting is required)
   • To-do (real product management work that I need to do)
   • Administrative (basically “Other”)

When you are done processing the entire list, make sure to turn off your email until your next email processing session.

Don’t Send a lot of Email

This is pretty straight-foward logic. If you send less email you will receive less email. Use the phone. Walk two doors down to ask a question. Call a 10-minute stand-up meeting to resolve an issue. You’ll get your answer faster and less email to process.

If you do need to send an email, make it short and to the point. Leo over at Zen Habits recommends writing emails that are three sentences or less. There’s a challenge for you!

Search, Don’t File

One of the best things I ever did as it relates to email processing was to give up my obsessively detailed filing of emails. It was a liberating decision! Now, I simply move my processed emails into a “Processed” folder (pretty intuitive, right?) where they sit until I archive them. If I need to dig up an old email, I simply go to the “Processed” folder and search for the email. The coolest part about this: It’s actually easier to find emails this way than searching through endless folders.

Let People Know What You’re Doing

The goal here is not to get you in trouble for not responding to an urgent email. Let people know about your new “email strategy.” Train people to pick up the phone and call you when there are emergencies. It will only take one slow response for most people to figure this out anyway. This is also an opportunity for you to teach others how to be more productive and survive email hell.

Here are some good sources for more tips on email management and productivity in general:

• Zen Habits
• “The Power of Less” by Leo Babauta
• “Getting Things Done” by David Allen
• 43 Folders: Inbox Zero

Happy living!