Zero Email Policy …with a twist
Hello there, it’s Laura!
This week I want to talk about how you can stay on top of your email and effectively use your email to help you with your work rather than it being another task you have to do. I’m going to walk you through the process that I use - similar to a zero email policy but with a twist!
That being said let’s kick it off with my first tip:
Replace Zero with Zero Unread
There are a lot of people that stand by the idea that zero email policy actually means your inbox being at 0. I don’t subscribe to this because I don’t believe you should be deleting emails - and there’s an entire section on this later on. However, my “zero email” policy is actually more a zero unread email policy. This might sound weird but let me develop this a bit. Zero unread emails simply means you no longer have emails that require you to do anything.
As you’re reading your emails - let’s say after you took some time off - some of these emails will require you to take action based on them and the vast majority of them will be just a read and move on. Based on the tip that I shared previously - if it takes less than two minutes to do, just do it right now - if the reply or action is simple for that email, shoot that off and move on. However, if the action is more complex or requires more thought, mark that email as unread and continue triaging through your emails.
This has the benefit of allowing you to go through all of your emails in a shorter time and see all the ones that require some sort of action from your side. This way you get to important ones faster and you also end up with a better idea of how many things you still have to do - each of them has an unread email attached.
I’ve used this method to organize my inbox across 3 companies and it has served me well. It does however have the downside that if you accidentally mark an email as read, you’ll probably forget about it.
Organize Your Inbox
On top of the process I just described, I do have to admit that it’s quite useful to set up rules for your inbox that help you stay organized. There’s many ways you can do this and the implementation of these will also depend on your email provider but let me just run through some of the things I found useful along the way
Folders or labels - This is probably one of the most basic division that you can make. Depending on what provider you use, you can either have folders or labels to help clump emails on the same theme together. These can be as granular as you need them to be but when you are setting them up I would advise you to think about how you’re going to maintain that granularity going forward. You’ll find out soon enough if you went overboard as you won’t keep up with your organization. But fear not, the next point is here to help you!
Filters - Filters go hand in hand with the folders and labels because you can program action for certain types of emails. For example, if you have a lot of automated messages from your service, you can set up a filter to always mark them as read and move them to the “Service X” folder or label, skipping your inbox completely. This is a quick way to stay on top of your email stash and avoid having to spend time manually marking and moving messages. Assuming that you work on projects that have widely different audiences, you can also set your filters to look for project names or senders and automatically route that email to the project folder. That way you have all the emails in one place and if you need to attach an email to a reply - it’s quick to find! Similarly, you can also set some types of emails to always move to trash! However be careful how you set this Trash filter up, since you might end up unwillingly deleting important emails.
Collapsing or Grouping - This might already be a feature in your email provider but if not, grouping emails that are in the same thread is really a God sent for organising. I believe that Outlook doesn’t default to this but the Google suite does.
Make a Decision
As a result of how my zero unread policy is devised, there is another downside that I have to highlight and address: it can happen that you just leave an email unread until it’s no longer on the first page of your email provider and you have to endlessly scroll to get it. This is obviously not ideal and it probably highlights that you’re procrastinating or putting off addressing your responsibilities. This is obviously not a place we want to be in so my best advice here is: make a decision! Don’t avoid the email, instead make the first step to resolve it. Maybe that’s asking for more time, asking for a meeting or simply asking if the request is still relevant after a few weeks have passed.
Do Not Delete
I read an article and said that when a project is done they just take the whole lot of emails for that project and delete the bunch. I think my eye started twitching right after he said that. I can’t stress enough, don’t delete your emails. These represent written proof that you did your job, that you communicated, that you did due diligence and so deleting them is really just a really dumb move on your part. If you really need inbox space or for some reason you want to not have those in your inbox instead of deleting them you should export them, archive them and then put them on your cloud storage in case you need it later. You really never know when you need to prove your work to someone so don’t risk getting caught with no past emails.
That being said, I do have some types of emails that I do delete and that I think it’s fine to delete: these are usually the automated alarms, status reports that I don’t use or that aren't relevant, update emails from tools such as Jira. These types of notification emails I do usually delete since they’re not really something you need to hang on to since the system that generated them already keeps the record for you. Their purpose ultimately is just to make your life easier and get that notification in your inbox. Outside of these I would say you shouldn’t go delete things.
Check Your Inbox Routinely
Of course, all the above tips only help you so much if you don’t actively check your email. I will admit I probably check my email more than is healthy but you don’t have to be like me. I would say you should start your day with going through your email and have at least one other natural checkpoint during the day. This can be after you came back from lunch or maybe as you’re wrapping up the day. Depending on the type of job that you do, twice a day might be a reasonable cadence but you can decide what is best for you.
How do you stay on top of your inbox? Let me know in the comments down below!
That’s all for today, folks.
Until next time, this is Laura signing off.
