ExamineHealth

A lot of us manage our work via email. Knowledge workers, as they've been come to be known, often live and die by email. This is where the work comes in, and this is where the work gets delivered when it's finished. Outlook can become this huge dashboard portal for your entire work life. It can schedule your appointments, track your to-do list, store reference documents, manage incoming requests, and send out the resulting deliverables. So it makes sense to learn to optimize your email system the best way possible.

Lots of people get overwhelmed by the amount of email that they get. The inbox can become overrun with items that aren't relevant, need to be filed, need to be done, or need to be deleted. Once this happens, it can be difficult to crawl out of the hole and get back to a homeostasis that you can feel comfortable with.

There are a lot of email management systems out there, some simple, and some complex. A lot of them can be very good once you get them all set up (which can be daunting in the first place), and if you rigorously stick to them (which can be as stressful as having an unmanaged inbox).

In this article, I'm not going to try to provide you with a complete email management system, that would take much longer than the scope of this single article. However, I can provide you with my single favorite tip, the method that I provide to anyone who expresses email frustrations to me. I think you'll find that it will make a huge difference in your email management, as well as your general productivity and accountability.

This technique is designed to help you achieve mastery over the qualities that knowledge workers today are judged most on: accountability and dependability. Do you have to be micro-managed? Or can you be trusted to deliver, without being prodded along, or checked up on? Does your boss need to ask you for deliverables that they provided you, or do you beat them to the punch and turn in things that they had forgotten they asked you to do?

This revolves around the concept of the 'open loop'. An open loop is something that is incomplete. When a task is assigned to you, it becomes an open loop. An open loop needs a set of actions applied to it in order to close it. Once the loop is closed, that deliverable is in the hands of the requestor, or that project is completed. When your boss asks you to do something, they're initiating an open loop. That loop stays open until you do something to close it. Sometimes that something is an action that you perform personally, sometimes it's something that you need to get someone else to do. For any given open loop, there is someone who 'has the ball', someone who's responsibility it is to take the next step towards completion. I find that it helps tremendously to consciously consider the 'ball' and who has it.

If you have the ball, then you need to do something to drive that open loop towards completion. That something might consist of you passing off the ball to someone else. Either by asking them for their help, delegating the task to someone who is better suited to performing it than you, scheduling a meeting to discuss an option to move forward, or any other number of ways that you might be passing the ball. Alternatively, you keep the ball, and you perform some function to the open loop to drive it to conclusion. Many times, any given open loop will require multiple actions to get it to completion. So there may be several iterations of you doing something, engaging someone else, doing some more, checking for feedback, doing something else, etc.

However, these open loops will always be in one of two states, either you have the ball, or someone else has the ball.

So the trick is to have a way to identify each of these two states within your email platform. The best way I have found to do this is to have a separate folder for open loops that are currently residing with someone else. For me, this is my "@waiting" folder. It could also be named "Follow Up" or "My Open Loops". I like the @waiting because it sorts the folder to the top of my folder list, which helps because I use it a lot. Anytime that someone else has the ball on an open loop that you are responsible for, you make sure that you have that communication stored in that folder.

The best way I've found to accomplish this is to BCC myself anytime I ask someone something, or ask them to do something, or in any way pass the ball to them. When that email shows back up in my inbox, I drag it to my @waiting folder. This ensures that all the email in @waiting is a duplicate (of the item in your Sent Items folder), which means that as soon as the ball is passed back to you, you can just delete that email message without needing to worry about archiving it. (If you forget to BCC yourself, or decide after the fact that you want to track that loop, you can always go into your Sent Items and drag a copy of the email into @waiting).

What this does is provide you with a way to track all of the balls that other people have. Now you are only tracking them if you care about them. Be cautious of trying to track every open loop that comes across your desk. You want to restrict this technique to things that you are responsible for, or things that you care about for some reason. Now these action items are off of your plate, out of your inbox, but not so far gone that you'll forget about them.

I revisit my @waiting folder every couple of days, but if I get busy, the longest I'll ever go without looking at it is one week. And the reason for that is that Friday's are my follow up days. Every Friday, I go through my @waiting folder, and anything that is in there that is older than 1 week, I send out a follow up request to that person. If the issue is pressing, and I'm not getting a response, I'll copy their superior. If I don't get a response the next week, I'll copy their boss's boss the following week. This usually gets a response before too long. And I've found that one week is about the right time to keep things moving along, without upsetting people. This could need to be adjusted depending on the criticality and speed of the project in question, or the general environment that you work in.

Once someone finally responds to your question, completes your request, or somehow passes the ball back to you, you can delete that email from your @waiting folder. Now, you may turn around and pass it right back, or you may pass it to someone else, in which case that email would go into @waiting. Or, you may need to actually do something with it yourself at that point.

How you identify the other half of open loops, where you have the ball, is up to you. You can have a separate folder called @todo and put those items in there. Just don't forget to check that folder! I find that I prefer to have items that I have to do in my face, so I leave them in my inbox and flag/star them. This indicates that I have to do something with those emails. If you're keeping your inbox really clean, and faithfully delete or file anything which doesn't have an action associated with it, then this technique can allow you to just let anything that's in your inbox represent something that you need to do something with (even if that something is deleting or filing). I find that the flag is a nice middle ground that draws my attention to things that people are waiting on, and separates them from things I have to do just to keep my own workspace neat and tidy.

Most people will find that adding a @waiting folder, or some sort of Follow Up folder, will greatly reduce their stress levels and almost magically make their email much more manageable. Let me know in the comments if you find this helpful, or have any questions. Also, please share any email management tips that you've found work for you!

 

blog comments powered by Disqus