Andrew McCauley's hack to cope with Email Overwhelm

Laura: Andrew, email overwhelm is a complaint that you and I hear from clients all the time. So I always hear you give such great feedback and information with how to overcome that. I would love it if you would share a tip or a hack to help people control their inbox instead of letting it control them.

 

Andrew: Email. I love email, but you’re right, Laura. It is one of those things that just kills productivity. It’s really crazy. So I learned a great trick for me from a friend of mine about 1.5 year ago, 2 years ago, and essentially, what it is is we all have the ability in our email programs to flag different emails.

 

Now I use a three-flag system or a three-star system. So I’m using Google. In Google, you have a different star, color star. So when I open up my inbox in the morning, I’ll often have, you know, 30, 40, 50 emails that I’m going to go through.

 

Now instantly, that’s overwhelming. I look at it and go, “Wow, there’s too many emails. How will I ever get through this sort of stuff?†So what I do is I make a commitment not to answer any of them straightaway because it’s so easy to get – Open up an email, read it, and suddenly go wow, it must be super urgent. I’ve got to answer this right now, but the actual fact is if you didn’t open up your emails for another 10 minutes say, then it wouldn’t be a problem. You’d still have... That email would have been answered.

 

So what I do is I allow myself 10 minutes, and I flip through the emails, and I star them. Now I star them according to what needs to happen. So my three-star system is like this. If it’s red, if I read it and I think I’ve got to answer this and nobody else can answer but me, I’d star it red so I know I’d come back to it.

 

If it’s something that I’ll yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t have to answer this person’s email right now. It’s not urgent, but I want to read it. I want to go through it and I want to consume this email a little bit later. I’ll make it a yellow star.

 

And then if it’s something that I’d forward on to one of my team, then I’m waiting on a response form. So let’s say somebody sends me an email and they’ll say, “Just letting you know that we contacted XYZ company, and we’re waiting for them to get back to us,†then I might put a green star on there and leave it in my inbox so that I know I’m waiting for something to happen. So if I come back in a day or two’s time and I look at my green stars, I can open it up and say, right, there’s an email. That’s right. I’m still waiting for that company to get back to us. Let me trace that up.

 

So I put the star system and once I’ve gone through those stars, then I allow myself some time to go and answer the red ones that are most important. I’ll leave the yellow ones there until I’m ready to go and look at those, and sometimes, there may be on a quiet part of the day when I’ve got nothing going on, which is pretty rare these days, but I’ll go and check that out.

 

So yellow, red, green. That’s how I use my star system. It works really, really effectively. I’ve been using that system for about 3 years. I use another flag system similarly previous to that, but I’ve found this one three stars. If you have too many, Laura, I think the problem is that you can’t remember what they all mean, what all the colors mean. So it’s like red I’ll answer, yellow I’ll look at, and green somebody else is doing something and I’m waiting for a response on that.