Handling Longer Than Two-Minute Emails, Part 1

Now we’re getting to where the rubber meets the road. There simply are messages that you can’t do the “hit and run” with… they require a little more. These are the messages that tend to drag us down. There are a couple of broad categories of messages that fall into this are. Messages that, in themselves serves as the action item (reminder) and messages that are better served by some type of project management system.

First, let’s talk about emails where the email itself best serves as the action reminder. In general, you want to work from a list, not a stack of emails. But on issues where you are dealing with very quick turnaround, it often works best to simply let the email itself serve as the action reminder. This is why I had you create the “working” folders in your email program. You’ll recall that I had you create these three folders: Answer, Hold, and Read. Here is what you do with that.

The Answer Folder: Emails Requiring a Response that Will Take Over 2 Minutes

If someone sends you an email that you are going to need to write a detailed response to, and you don’t have time to do that right now, put it into the “Answer” folder. Do not do this for every email you have to answer — if the answer will take less than two minutes, you should answer it right away. This is for emails that will require additional time before you can put it aside. Hopefully, you won’t have many of these.

The Read Folder: Emails Requiring Reading that Will Take Over 2 Minutes

If you get an email containing substantial reading material that will take you more than 2 minutes, such as a project plan or a lengthy article, put it in the “Read” folder. Again, if you can read it right away, please do so. You will thank yourself later. This is only for the long reads! Once the longer reads are in a folder, you can then prioritize and ask if this is even necessary.

The Hold Folder: Emails Requiring You to Wait on Someone Else’s Action

Sometimes you get an email on which you need to wait for an answer from someone else before you can respond.  You know the drill… you’re coordinating a project, or schedules, that require input from multiple groups/individuals. You receive a message that requires a response from someone else before you can finalize the issue so you put the original email into the “Hold” folder so that it is not cluttering up my email while I wait. When you get the appropriate response(s) you can go back to the “Hold” folder and respond to the original message. Oh, don’t forget to delete the message once you’ve completed this final response.

Empty These Regularly

There is a danger in having these “working” email files: you could put emails in them and then just leave them there, doing nothing. That would be counterproductive to what we want to accomplish. After you are done processing your email, or at another time in the day, you then need to go through the working folders and execute those emails. Read the “Read” emails, answer the “answer” emails, and see if you’ve received answers to the “Hold” emails. You need to actually have a defined time each day when you clear out these folders. You can’t leave it to your memory and hope this will happen sometime this week. You have to do it once a day, and get to the bottom of each of them.

Do Not Have an Action Folder

When I first heard this, I have to admit that I was a little taken aback. It really sounds like a good plan for those items that take longer than 2-minute to close out. But when I heard the arguments for NOT having an “Action” folder, I have to say that I now agree with it. The reason a generic “Action” folder is not a good idea is that it is not specific enough. Every time you go into it, you will essentially be re-processing everything in your mind. The point of the working files is that these emails have already been processed. You know what to do with them, you just haven’t done it yet. That’s why you need to get specific and create the three types we’ve discussed above: Answer, Read, and Hold. If the action on an email is not specific enough to fall into one of those categories, then you should not allow the email to be its own action reminder.

Come back tomorrow and I’ll give you some sneaker rules for managing your inbox.

Thanks,

Roger

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Managing Your Inbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.