There are many things in our lives that have become accepted norms, even though if you examined it in depth, you’d quickly come to the conclusion that they aren’t really very good at what you want them to do, at least not anymore. Changing them is not very likely or would take a significant amount of time and therefore we are stuck with it. Let me give you some examples. Central Heating, at least the way it works in most homes today, is a really inefficient way of heating a home. Modern technology and innovation could dramatically improve this area but it is unlikely to happen quickly. Why? Because to change old homes over to a completely different system would be expensive and highly disruptive to life. And putting it in new homes is unfamiliar and therefore off putting to people looking to buy. So, given this, there just isn’t the demand at the moment for a better heating system. The electric plug could be another example. Especially outside of countries like the UK which is known to have one of the safest designs in the world. Changing the design and operation of how we get electricity and power into the devices we use isn’t something you can just change. You couldn’t design a new plug that was 300% more effective and safer and put it on the shelves but no-one would buy it. No-one could use it unless they re-wired their home. But how does this relate to effective email management?
Email, is a terrible form of communication in my opinion. Yes it has many benefits to it but in reality, it sits in an odd place on the spectrum of different ways of communicating. It is asynchronous and instantaneous. This is an odd combination. Synchronous communication is where you are communicating with someone in real time. Face to face, on Zoom or on the phone. Asynchronous is where this is not the case. A letter would normally take a couple of days to arrive and then you allow a week or more for a response.
Here is why I don’t like it. With other instantaneous types of communication like text messages, you only tend to use it for quick queries and responses. This works fine. But we tend to use email for anything and everything. We send quick one line emails that are queries or just FYI. This is how we share documents. This is how we communicate important information and news. This is how we hold lengthy back and forth discussions over matters of little or great importance. We do not really know what email is or what it is for and so we use it for everything without giving it much thought.
The result is a distracting mess of stuff. I would not even know where to begin to explain the many and various inefficiencies that develop through our over use of email but here is my top list of issues.
- It is a distraction. Many people in the work place end up spending most of their day on their email. This is because every email that comes in is allowed to distract them. So, every 5 – 15 minutes, they stop what they are doing to go to their email.
- Things easily get lost. Because we treat email as a long form information distribution tool, a significant discussion tool and a quick query and FYI tool, normally to us as the sender, we can end up with things all over the place. Key information is buried in unrelated email threads or lost in ‘Untitled Messages’. Documents or information can be stored in emails kept for future reference but finding this all again is not easy. Some clients do not have good search options.
- We tend to consider things off our plate after we have sent an email about them. This is bad because the issue hasn’t really been resolved, its just we feel we have done something and then we often forget about it. So you need to delegate something and you consider it done after you have sent an email, without ever receiving confirmation that the person has received, fully understood and has capacity for the task you assign them. Or, you need some information and mark the task complete having emailed about it, despite not actually receiving the information you need.
- We send and receive a lot of unnecessary emails. This could be because they could be better dealt with via another means or because we cc people in who do not need to be involved in the whole conversation or it could be because they do not need to be sent at all.
- If we do not keep on top of it, it can very quickly get out of hand. I once had 3 weeks off work. I returned to 2,316 emails in my inbox. 156 were emails I needed to read. Around half of that actually needed some kind of response. The point is that in order to keep track of the emails you actually need to, you have to engage with all the ones that you don’t because they are all mixed up together in one inbox. If you don’t then your inbox just grows and grows and it becomes even easier to miss things you need.
So all in all, I do not like email that much.
Now, there is something that you can do about it and I will give you my advice in a moment. Here is the truth of it though. I have heard and read a lot of stuff about how it is possible to sort out your approach to email so it need never be an issue again. I understand this point but I do not fully agree. Email places us at the mercy of the people who send us emails. We cannot force change upon the email habits of everyone who communicates with us this way. Therefore, even applying the best practices here can only take us so far.
But, we can change our own practices and hopefully this will rub off on other people.
- Do not consider email to be urgent communication. Either in sending or receiving it. If you need something from someone urgently, then call them or ask for it via another means. If someone needed you urgently, they would not email you. If your house was on fire, you would expect a phone call to let you know, not an email.
- Disable all email notifications. If email is not urgent, and if you follow point 3 below, then you do not need to be notified. This includes pop up notifications, banners and the little bubble that tells you how many unread emails that you have. Having any of these on will only distract from whatever it is you are doing.
- Plan when you process your email. The best times to do this will depend on your line of work. For me in my role, I processed my email 3 times a day. On 3 days of the week I did this at the start of the day, before/just after lunch and again at 3:30pm, on the other 2 days, I had 90 minutes of focussed work first and then processed email with the rest of the day running as the others. Operating this way means that you are sparing yourself a reactive approach to work and being deliberate with your use of time.
- When you process your email – process it. This is different from checking email and different from responding to email. When you ‘check’ email you generally scan the list for the big things and then ignore the rest, leaving them in your inbox. Processing means that you go through each email in your inbox in turn and decide what it is and what to do with it. Delete, save or action/respond. I say different from responding as well. The standard line is if you can reply in less than 2 minutes then you should. But if you have 20 emails that this applies to then that is 40 minutes and you may not have allocated this long. Many will require more than you can do in 2 minutes. I generally have a hybrid approach. Some emails I will respond to, others will become tasks in my task manager, others still will get put into an ‘Action Today’ folder. This means I will respond within 48 hours. One of my email sessions each day is deliberately longer to give me time to go into this folder and respond.
- Keep your inbox clear. As I said above, if you do not do this then you run the risk of missing something important in the midst of all the dross.
- Filter out any newsletters that you never read – or unsubscribe. You may have FOMO about this, but ask yourself when you last read it and when will you actually read it in the future?
- If you get an email that is unclear to you then call the person to clarify. Email tennis is not a fun game!
I give you these tips, but the truth is there are some things that I believe we should do to make our emails more helpful for others.
- Always include a subject line – even if the whole e-mail is in the subject line. Not having a subject line makes the email impossible to keep track of in the future for the recipient. This is especially important if the email contains important information of any kind.
- Never reply to an email someone has sent you to begin a new conversation or talk to them about something totally unrelated. This may save you 5 seconds but as above, makes the email really hard to track down in future. I consider these last two incredibly selfish things to do.
- Ask yourself if you are being clear to someone who isn’t you. The one line instruction may make perfect sense to you but without the context of whatever you are thinking may be nonsense to your recipient.
- Ask if e-mail is the best form of communication for the issue at hand
- Ask yourself this – do I even need to send an e-mail at all?
With all of this said, I want to end by propose some alternatives. First is an app called Twist. This is an app that is designed for asynchronous communication. I have never really used it in a team setting but it has many features that I think will work well for teams. Firstly, all communication is organised in workspaces, channels & threads but in addition you can message individuals or create groups. There are many ways of using this but given that part of my aim here is to help church ministry teams I will use his context. You can create a workspace, which represents your church, company or organisation. Everyone on your team would have access to this. Within this workspace you can create a channel for your eldership, another channel for your Senior Staff, another channel for All staff and as many other channels as you need. Access to these channels would be invitation only or open to everyone as you see fit. Within these channels you create threads for specific discussions. These could be broad categories or conversations related to specific events, plans, issues, ministries or projects.
Any new messages you receive will be in these threads and they will also show up in your inbox. What this means is that your communication is organised by default for everyone in the same way rather than something that every person has to manually do themselves. I won’t elaborate further but I will say that this kind of communication tool eliminates some of the problems with email.
The second is to make use of the collaboration features of your workspace. If you are using google, Microsoft or Apple then these workspaces all have them. Whether it is sharing documents using the cloud storage rather than attaching them to an email, or commenting and tagging people within documents directly rather emailing around multiple versions of the same document that become impossible to follow who has made or suggested which amendments or utilising shared calendar and task management features to better organise your team. All of this could provide a much better alternative to defaulting to use email for everything.
Obviously this will only apply to those in your organisation and you will need to still use email for communicating to those outside. However, since most of the email that most of us receive is internal, having a different means of dealing with this is a much better way to do it in my view.
