by John Freeman
3. Check It Twice a Day
Although it is impossible for many of us to imagine, it is possible to check your e-mail far less frequently, even just twice a day, and get more accomplished while doing so. H. L. Mencken checked and answered his mail twice daily and was able to respond to eighty letters because he scheduled the time to do so; there was also a lag time between when his missives went out and when they arrived, and again if he received a response. If they had been e-mails he was sending, his replies would probably have generated yet more correspondence the same day, as some of the eighty recipients would most likely have written back right away.
It is unlikely that the time it takes e-mails to arrive will ever slow down. Still, following Mencken’s rule will free up large chunks of your day formerly spent fidgeting with e-mail (and creating yet more of it); even so, your messages will arrive exponentially faster than Mencken’s since all of them will get there instantly. You will also be fully present when you get around to sending your messages, rather than fighting between bits and blips of your day. As a result, your e-mail will be more lucid and better designed to get a clean, fast response.
Checking your e-mail twice a day (or even just once an hour) will also allow you to set the agenda for your day, which is essential if you want to stay on task and get things done in a climate of constant communication. How many times do we get so distracted by e-mail that we lose focus and forget there was something very important we had intended to complete during the workday? And then you have to stay late at work, when it’s quiet and e-mail isn’t coming in as fast, to get it done. Checking your e-mail once in the morning and again in the afternoon will allow you to scroll through messages, pull out the urgent ones, add them to your agenda, and respond accordingly. Your to-do list will remain intact and then shrink.
If you work in an environment where many people keep their inboxes open all day, put an automatic return message on your mailbox directing people to contact you through other channels. It can be a simple message and needn’t scold people for using e-mail. WebWorkerDaily cited this message as an example:
Due to a technical issue, there is a possibility I may never see your email. If it is important, please call me at xxx xxx-xxxx.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
For a brief time, this autoreply will create more messages for your correspondents and contacts, but it will quickly train them out of e-mailing you about small or insignificant things, freeing up time for you to do important work and actually become a more useful colleague or contact. If the message is worded correctly, it will also reinforce your availability without cutting off communication. If their needs are important, your friends and colleagues will get in touch with you and your time away from the e-mail Tilt-a-Whirl will allow you to address them more adequately.
Following this rule is especially important if you have built up a giant backlog of e-mail. Some e-mailers recommend that you simply delete them all and start fresh. This always seems extreme to me. A great many of the backlog e-mails can probably just be deleted, but there will be many that you should probably address and some that might be irreplaceable. If you have amassed a large backlog, set them aside in a file folder in your inbox and budget time every day to deal with them. Make a goal—such as cleaning your inbox backlog in thirty days— and track your progress. Be ruthless about what gets a response. Many of these e-mails will be from people you’re currently corresponding with, so you can easily batch your responses right in with current correspondence. If you can manage to check your e-mail less—if not twice a day, then once an hour, tops—you will be creating less e-mail, and that will make it less likely you’ll have to face a backlog again.
Staying true to the twice-a-day rule is crucial for anyone who works in a job that requires sustained concentration. For this reason, writers and journalists the world over have begun to ration their Internet time, pulled Wi-Fi out of their homes and computers, and in some cases started keeping two separate computers, one for writing and the other for communicating with the outside world. It’s not just writers, though. Donald Knuth, a computer science professor at Stanford University, has actually given up e-mail altogether. “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things,” he writes on his Web site. “But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”
4. Keep a Written To-do List and Incorporate E-mail into It
Even if you want to stay on top of things in a fast-paced environment and be the person who appears to do it all, it is essential for you to pull yourself out of the e-mail interface and create a to-do list. Many technology consultants will recommend that you add new applications, more sophisticated gadgets, and new for-pay services that coordinate all your activities, rearrange how you work, and become further enmeshed with a computer program. None of this is necessary. Remember the PalmPilot? It did all that and more, yet, in the end, it was basically an expensive address book and message pad.
For a couple of bucks you can buy a legal pad and keep a rolling to-do list on it. If this is the first interface you check in with every day and the last you consult at the end of the day, you will save yourself a lot of hassle when *urgent* e-mail comes in and threatens to bump you off schedule. After you check your e-mail in the morning, add the messages that came in that cannot be responded to immediately to the list and set a time frame for answering them. If it’s going to take a few days to get back to someone, and that person seems like the type of correspondent who might expect an immediate answer, e-mail him or her back to set expectations: “Thanks, Don, it’s going to take me a day or two to get to this. I’ll e-mail you when I’ve got an answer.” Frantic e-mailing often occurs when people feel as if they haven’t been heard. A short reply e-mail at the time a request arrives could save you a few exchanges down the road as you set and rearrange time frames.
Keeping a separate, written to-do list will help pull you out of the computer and into a frame of mind where you can think realistically about what is and isn’t important and how long it will take you to do a task. Working in e-mail all day, the batting back and forth, the constant typing gives us the impression that everything can be accomplished in a workday, that it must be finished, or else we have homework. No matter how much you love a job, holding yourself to this standard will eventually make you resent it; when six or seven o’clock rolls around, there will always be one more message to write, one more ping to clock in. If you have a written to-do list, however, all those inevitable cross-outs and updates will serve as a reminder that all things change, things need to get done, but timetables are constantly being updated.
5. Give Good E-mail
E-mail can be extremely useful when used well because it has many things a letter does not, starting with the subject line. Use it. If you have a very short message—“I can meet you tomorrow at 5”— that can be stated in a direct, friendly way (you don’t want to sound as if you are giving orders), simply put it in the subject line. If you are passing on information that someone else can use but isn’t urgent, simply type FYI; to really cut down on your responses, type EOM (end of message) in the subject line of such messages, or “no response needed,” both of which will make it clear that you don’t expect or really want a “thanks” or a comment. These phrases may feel robotic at first, but using them will help your recipient sort your message and it will ensure that it gets answered in a timely fashion. If something is truly urgent, call the other person; those red exclamation points should be used sparingly, if at all.
Messages should almost always be short. Writing short messages will help your recipient figure out what you need and get back to you quickly. If you have questions, separate them out in the text of the message so that it’s clear that you’re asking for more than one piece of information. If you have more than a couple of questions, call someone on the telephone or—if he or she works better in chat format—send an instant message
to schedule a call in order to minimize the back-and-forth or to work efficiently in an environment where back-and-forth is the norm. If you’re sending a message to a friend and it grows to more than a few paragraphs, what you’re writing is a letter, not an e-mail. Does the message need to get there within a few minutes? If not and you want to send a gesture, print it out or write it out by hand and send it as a letter. It leaves a small carbon footprint, will be a welcome relief from bills and credit card solicitations, and will stand out even more than if you sent it by e-mail, where it has a chance of getting buried and becoming just one more piece of e-mail on the heaping mound of guilt in many people’s inboxes.
E-mail may be fast, but opening and dealing with it takes time. So don’t bludgeon people with serial messages. Setting an e-mail schedule—twice a day, again, is best—will force you to stop and think about what you need from people or what you want to tell them. Working with e-mail constantly open gives the impression that all people are constantly available. Nothing looks worse than sending five, six, seven messages to the same person within a short time frame: “Oh, yeah, I forgot something.” This type of machine-gunning makes you look disorganized and will decrease the chances that your e-mails are read closely, since your recipients will start to expect an endless series of updates. Here we go again. Eventually, your correspondents will start to sit on your messages so they can batch replies—and if this happens, you have forced your respondent to get organized for the both of you.
Finally, if you want people to contact you through other channels, which is essential if you are going to cut down on your e-mail, make sure that you have a signature on your e-mail that provides your mailing address, your telephone numbers, and the address of a Web site or your Skype address. Sending e-mail without this information is almost like sending a letter without a return address. You are basically ensuring that people have only one way to contact you: by e-mail.
6. Read the Entire Incoming E-mail Before Replying
This seems like a pretty basic rule, but a great deal of e-mail is generated by people replying without having properly read initial messages. If you follow the first five rules, following this one will become second nature. You will have less e-mail to read, and you will be in a more concentrated frame of mind when you are in fact checking it. Following this rule will also bring a bit of civility back into e-mail correspondence. There’s nothing worse than answering someone’s question thoughtfully and then getting a fast reply that shows they completely ignored all the time you put into crafting a message. If someone has asked you for several pieces of information, answer what you can and set a timetable for when you will get back to that person on everything else. Mark it on a to-do list and then put the initial message in a “pending” folder. Slowly, your inbox will clear out, and you won’t feel such a mixture of doom and confusion upon opening it.
If you need to keep a paper trail and you want to save paper, file your outgoing message only; that way you have both the request and the reply. E-mail advisers are of mixed minds about file folders; Mark Hurst, a user experience consultant who has developed an online to-do list, is flatly against it. But the truth of the matter is that important information and communication will continue to arrive by e-mail, and creating a small number of files will make your inbox that much more organized and empty. Think hard about how much you want to file, however; the only thing more annoying than being buried in e-mail is spending most of a day sitting before your computer filing the stuff.
7. Do Not Debate Complex or Sensitive Matters by E-mail
One of the biggest causes of flame wars and e-mail hostility is the idea that we can somehow work effectively while every single one of our visual cues is browned out. We can’t. The law of averages is against us. If one of every two messages is misunderstood, working with someone exclusively by e-mail will build up a backdraft of irritation and hurt feelings. This can become a serious situation when you decide to discuss job performance or want to offer constructive feedback, register frustration, apologize, or plead for help. In all such cases, if you can do it, a face-to-face meeting is best. If you can’t meet face-to-face, talk by telephone or, better yet, download Skype, buy an inexpensive camera—if you don’t have one built into your computer—and have a video chat; it will be cheaper than making a long-distance call, and you will be able to see the other person.
Recognizing the importance of steering clear of sensitive topics in e-mail is especially important at work. Complex questions of strategy or planning that involve people’s jobs and livelihoods, their sense of intelligence, requires clear thinking and careful parsing, both of which are almost impossible to do in a climate of frenzy. They’re even harder to do in an environment in which all your natural communication receptors are blocked from functioning. Sit down face-to-face, and, as difficult as it may be, your awkwardness in delivering a message—your expressions, your hesitations, your self-interruptions—will go a lot further to convince the person you’re talking to that you are aware that he or she is on the receiving end of a message that may be hard to spit out but essential nonetheless.
8. If You Have to Work as a Group by E-mail, Meet Your Correspondents Face-to-Face
In Here Comes Everyone, Clay Shirky described how when he was a computer programmer he worked on an important project that involved communicating with people in remote offices by e-mail. Eventually, misunderstandings ground the group nearly to a halt. They decided to fly out to a city and meet in person, and all of the hostility vanished when they met one another face-to-face and realized they were not horrible people. Morale improved, and the team met its deadline.
Many more companies in our era are spread out around the globe or throughout geographic regions, making it difficult for people working together to get together in the same room. Companies that fly people to a city to meet and get together will make an invaluable investment in collective goodwill and long-term productivity, but we’re at the stage of climate change where environmental factors should be taken into consideration. Companies need to ask themselves: How essential is a meeting? Who should the key participants be? If people do not work in the same building or city, buy them all Skype or another video chat service so that they can see one another and have something at least vaguely resembling face-to-face interaction. All the hours that are rescued by not having to put out fires, mediate disputes, and patch up miscommunications will be opened up to pick up new business, rest and recuperate, or move on to new projects.
9. Set Up Your Desk to Do Something Else Besides E-mail
In the past two hundred years, human beings have undergone a radical shift in our environment. We have always adapted our environment to our needs—some argue that this is what makes us human—but now we have entered a postnatural world. We have extended day into night, we have developed technologies of movement that allow us to travel far faster than a human or horse can. We have developed numerous forms of technology that allow us to communicate without touching anything or anyone at all.
As much as you can, take control over your office space by setting aside part of your desk for work that isn’t done on the computer. Imagine it as your thinking area, where you can read or take notes or doodle as you work out a problem. The computer screen can sometimes feel like an all-day-long electrical interrogative; it will take as much as you can ask of it and still be ready for more. There are many jobs, however, that would benefit from workers’ swiveling away from the screen and concentrating fully on a task. Building your work area up in a way that allows you to do that may save your sanity and make you more efficient.
10. Schedule Media-free Time Every Day
At the end of the day, it is important to remember that we were not born to e-mail, download, watch YouTube, and play online games. We had to learn to do all these things, and if the time we spend during work hours using these tools and toys leaves us agitated, we can also decide not to use them after work. If plugging in at night has become a habit, you might need to remi
nd yourself that there’s another way to spend your evening hours. For a week try to shut off all media at nine or ten o’clock, and see what happens to your body and mind. Set the parameters as narrow or as broad as you like, but make sure it means at least no e-mail and messaging. If you want to be bold, cut out all screens—TV, video, handheld, computer.
If you have been having trouble sleeping, it’s possible you might gradually feel your body slow down at last. The person who has been sitting next to you on the couch might sharpen in focus; stresses at your job could begin to seem less like Armageddon and more like something happening over there. That cluster of what-ifs and niggling doubts that is occluded by work and the pace of your schedule might slide back into view. Maybe you will finally go back to French lessons, read the newspaper; maybe you can make it home in time to watch your daughter’s soccer game. You might begin to think of the people in your life who aren’t always in touch via e-mail, wonder how they’re doing.
This awareness—this presence in the moment—is what gives us the power to act and make decisions, to shape our own lives and truly touch other people. Life might change in the blink of an eye, as the cliché goes, but we also take part in that change and steer it by living purposefully. Of all the things e-mail overload robs from us—be it the pleasure of our work, the strength of our eyes, or even the relationships that flame out through its lack of social cues—this is the most severe. Watching the abuse of e-mail start to choke this mindfulness out of friends and coworkers, strangers on the street, I realized that this is not simply an issue for efficiency experts but a serious epistemological concern for our society. It is affecting our capacity to know one another and the world, to listen. It’s grave enough that if we allow it to continue unchecked, we will have nothing worth sending—a terrible loss. Worst of all, if these past few years are any gauge, that won’t stop e-mail from arriving, either.
