Second Cup: How to Spend Less Time on Email

Email can expand to fill all available space. One Before Breakfast listener writes in with an inbox strategy that has helped her do better work for her clients without getting burned out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is about how to spend less time on email.
Email is an incredibly useful tool. I started my career
working as a journalist, and I learned to report before
a lot of people had access to email. It was
a very different experience. Trying to get people on the

(00:23):
phone was often tough. Sources would call you back while
you were on the phone with someone else, so there's
a lot of phone tag and since you often had
to go through gatekeepers to get people on the phone,
it was tempting to keep calling the same people you
knew would talk with you. Email has opened this all up.
Everyone is more accessible. This is awesome in some ways,

(00:46):
and it's also a problem in some other ways. Accessibility
means anyone can email anyone anywhere in the world at
any time, and so we do. I don't have to
tell you that email overload is the cause of an
incredible amount of workplace stress. People feel constantly behind. In
My time management fable Juliette School of Possibilities, In one scene,

(01:09):
Riley notes that the number of unread messages in her
inbox appears to be rising like seconds on a stop watch.
People have told me that reading that scene has made
them feel incredibly anxious. So I wanted to share a
strategy that one before Breakfast listener wrote in to tell
me was working for her. She's a project management consultant
working for global clients. That means that I can receive

(01:33):
emails at all hours of the day. She writes, I
often wake up in the morning to a full day's
worth of emails from Asia and a good chunk from
Europe as well. Usually by the time I get through
my responses, the American emails are starting to roll in,
with Eastern time emails through my work day and Pacific
time emails after I've left the office. When I first
took on this position, she writes, I'd be answering emails

(01:56):
at five am, nine am to five pm, and then
late into my evening. This not only led to burn out,
but also my responses were less detailed than they should be,
and I was being distracted from my other tasks and
my personal life. So she writes, she discovered email BATCHNG.
Here's what she did. I turned off email notifications entirely

(02:19):
and set two one hour long blocks into my calendar.
One in the early morning for Asia and Europe, and
one in the afternoon for the Americas. I then stopped
responding to any emails not labeled urgent outside of this time.
So now, if you're listening to this, you may be
wondering if all our listeners clients got angry and decided
to find other consultants who had respond instantly. The answer

(02:42):
is no. It was amazing how quickly, without saying anything,
clients responded to the shift, she writes. If anything urgent
came up, they used their phones, which is something we
too often avoid. It allowed me to stay on task
during the rest of my work day, well also giving
thoughtful responses to emails during my designated time blocks. Sometimes

(03:03):
I need more than an hour, she writes, and sometimes
I need less, but setting the time in advance allows
me to be more productive. I can be productive not
just with email time, but all my time. She calls
this a significant win. I agree. What this consultant realized
is that, yes, clients want her to be responsive, but

(03:24):
the reason they're emailing her is that they think she
has great ideas. They think she can come up with
genius solutions to their problems. If she's constantly on email
and constantly moving back and forth between email and other things.
She can't do that, plus her responses are going to
be less well thought through than they might be. The
hard truth here is that sometimes you need to disappoint

(03:47):
someone's immediate expectation, such as that they will receive an
immediate response, in order to meet the bigger expectation, which
is an actual solution to their challenges. So i'd encourage
you to try back your email responses now. Don't worry.
I'm not one of those people who says you should
never check email in the morning or only once per day.

(04:07):
For most people, that's really just not workable. You'll notice
that our project management consultant said she would answer stuff
marked urgent, and if she's doing that, that means she's
looking at her inbox more frequently than twice a day.
It makes sense if someone emails you that your one
thirty meeting is canceled, you'd probably like to know that.
If you're not getting a whole lot of email from

(04:27):
overseas so you don't need to make sure you respond
before the end of another continent's work day, then maybe
your response blocks can be at different times, say ten
thirty to eleven thirty in the morning rather than really
early like six or seven am, and then three thirty
to four thirty in the afternoon to get the stuff
from the day. But setting two blocks of time to
respond to emails and then maybe two other times to

(04:49):
quickly check in for urgent questions means that you're never
more than about two hours from seeing someone's email at
least during your work day, and that's pretty good. It
also guarantees that you're spending about two and a half
hours per work day on email, instead of feeling like
you're spending ten hours a day on email. You could
possibly even work fewer hours and make more progress on

(05:10):
your big projects if you're not in your inbox all
the time. And hey, I am all in favor of
anything that helps people feel less busy while getting more done.
So think about your schedule and whether you could schedule
to email response blocks and maybe a few more scheduled
quick checks during the day. If you try it, let
me know. And thanks to our project management consultant for

(05:33):
sending in her schedule strategy. I love to hear from listeners,
so if you have a question or a tip, please
let me know. You can email me at before breakfast
podcast at iHeart media dot com. I'll probably be responding,
but not more than twice a day. In the meantime,
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making

(05:54):
the most of our time.