Processing email - the two-minute rule

[GettingThingsWon]

Howdy folks, long-time lurker making an appearance here.

I'm in a corporate environment, and I constantly battle the expectation that email is used for important and even urgent things. Some people will send another email 24 hours later because no reply has been received, never realizing that it's not terribly effective at getting my attention.

The default behavior in my organization is to work out of the inbox (complete with pop-ups and sounds upon email arrival), so I don't get a lot of sympathy for missed emails, even though they typically aren't as crucial as the other work I'm doing. Mostly out of stubbornness toward this irksome cultural trend, I sometimes resist getting to Zero Inbox (despite knowing how good it feels) when the backlog gets sufficiently large. I've been facing one since the beginning of the week, and it doesn't seem to be getting to zero.

I have two questions around this:
1. What's your preferred method for doing a large-scale email backlog purge?
2. How do you think email of this nature fits into your overall productivity system, if at all?

Purging the backlog
I tend to approach this in one of three ways, having not settled on a single strategy yet:
1. File relevant items under @Email and keep moving. Zero Inbox is the goal, so don't get distracted. Frequently results in not actually replying at all.
2. Use the "two-minute rule" to reply to emails as I go. Significantly bloats processing time, sometimes prevents Zero Inbox attainment altogether.
3. File relevant items under @Email and move them to REPLY folder, get to Zero Inbox, and then process all REPLY items.

What's your go-to in this situation? I find it especially important after I've been off my GTD game for a few days and need to get back on. I'm noticing more and more that stopping to answer emails takes me out of processing mode, even for the simplest replies, but I worry that if I don't handle it right away, then I'll forget it forever.

Email re: GTD
A bigger question is how this fits into the bigger picture. Ideally, all email that I send and receive would be aligned with my projects, goals, and vision for the future. In reality, this is not the case. Is it worth doing this "busy work" to keep things moving, even though it's not aligned with your higher goals? Or did you restructure your perspective to include this sort of task as necessary and useful; e.g., create an Area of Focus to incorporate it? Finally, if you've got a bloated inbox AND a bunch of other [not necessarily time-sensitive] work that needs attention, which do you usually address first?

Obviously, part of the remedy here is just to do the thing and not be caught up in introspection, but when I notice recurrence being more frequent than I'd like, I tend to think there's some root cause deeper than simple discipline can address. To that end, your thoughts on this would be appreciated.

 

[TesTeq]

Some people will send another email 24 hours later because no reply has been received, never realizing that it's not terribly effective at getting my attention.

If you think that their expectations are not effective ignore them. Don't reply and prove that they are wrong. (#LittleBitOfSarcasmHere ;-) ).

For me replying within 24 hours is a standard operating procedure. People expect it from me and I deliver. What about tasks that cannot be done within 24 hours? Within 24 hours I answer with a deadline when they can expect the real answer with actual data.

 

[Gardener]

1. File relevant items under @Email and keep moving. Zero Inbox is the goal, so don't get distracted. Frequently results in not actually replying at all.

This is the one that I lean toward. I don't really believe in the two-minute rule.

But the question is why you don't reply at all? Is that a bad thing? Are you failing to reply to emails that you wish you had replied to? Or are you prioritizing "late" so that an email that wasn't important enough to deal with got to @email and then trashed later? These are both problems, but they're different problems.

If you're failing to get back to mails that you really should get back to, then one possible solution is to schedule a regular time to go through your @email--to treat @email as a task/project, rather than treating each email as belonging to the project that they belong to.

So maybe for an hour after lunch every Monday and Wednesday, you sit down and go through @email. The ones that are pretty quick, you knock off: re-mail that document to the guy who always loses his emails, say yes, say no, and so on. (Assuming that the yeses and nos are quick ones that don't require research.)

The ones that require time and thought, you transform into tasks elsewhere in your system. If Joe in finance emailed to ask for added detail for your cost estimate, that's not an "@email" task, it's a cost estimating task that happened to flow in through email. You get rid of the email part by emailing Joe to predict that he'll hear back from you by X date, and you put the cost estimating task into your system with a note that you should mail the results to Joe.

If you're simply not going to get certain things done promptly, it's still IMO better to bounce back some sort of response. When I get a response of, "I won't be able to get to this until I get back from travel on October 15," that's useful information to me, even if it's not information that makes me happy. It gives me time to search for another way to get the information, or it lets me pass the "sorry, this is going to be late" message on to whoever asked me.

If you're utterly snowed under for a limited period and you get countless emails, you could have an automated Out of Office message (even if you're in the office) telling people when you're likely to come up for air, so that they know better than to expect a response before that. This is of course safer if your immediate boss is the one that wants you to be putting complete focus on whatever you're snowed under with.

Even if I can't provide a reliable estimate, I may get back to a person with, "I hope to get this for you by early next week. If you don't hear from me by Tuesday afternoon, feel free to ping me." That's not professional of me--I really should be able to get them a date and stick to it. But if I can't, some sort of noise from my side of the wall is IMO better than silence. On the other hand, I do think that it's reasonable to throw some things back: "I'm snowed under right now. Please ask me again in early November." These sound like the same thing; I'm not quite sure why I perceive them as being different.

I guess my summary is that @email should, IMO, be separated from actually doing the tasks represented by the email, and should be handled on a regular basis.

 

[Bohemia]

I'm wondering what form of communication you expect/desire that people use for urgent or important asks.would you prefer that they call you? Walk into your office? I personally prefer email because it doesn't interrupt me and I can process it when convenient.

Here's my method for Inbox Zero:
--I turn off email notifications so they don't interrupt me.
--I check my email regularly (minimum once an hour)
--anything that's not actionable, I either delete or file in a reference folder.
--anything that needs info or action from someone else, I forward (delegate) but I leave it in my inbox for the time being. (If they answer quickly, I can respond back to the email and then delete it. This is fewer steps than putting it in a Waiting For" folder.)
--anything that I can reply then and there to, I do. Sometimes these are quick things, sometimes I have to attach files or look something up or answer questions with lots of details. Sometimes my email checking is to scan for more urgent things ("did John send me those numbers yet?" Or "anything new requests from customers that I need to take care of to keep a project moving?") in that case I might let the little stuff sit because I don't have time right now or it's of lower priority.
--if the reply or action is something that will take more time than just typing a reply, I put it in "action support" folder and add a task to my list
--at the end of each day, I go back through my inbox and clean house. If I don't yet have replies, I move emails into Waiting For. If it's a thread that's done, I either delete or file in Reference. If I still need to do something about it, I either finish it then or add it to a list.

Many of my emails are from customers. There's no way I'd put their emails aside and not answer them promptly. And if I can take a minute or two to give info to a colleague so they can finish a task, I feel I should do that, even if it's not particularly urgent or important. If they're coming to me too often that it's draining my time, then it might be time to teach them to fish so they are more self-sufficient.

Is it a volume issue for you? Or do you get irritated because digging up a number for Mary helps her with her project and doesn't contribute at all to yours? If the latter, then perhaps you need to realize that you are part of a team, and some of everyone's time is spent contributing to the good of the whole. Others are helping you with tasks that aren't on their project lists, and cultivating relationships with reciprocity is a good higher goal.

if it's a volume issue, then may need to just work late to do a big catch-up and then stay on top of it going forward. Or look at the requests and you find recurring ones, consider delegating, teaching them to fish, or making it possible for them to self-serve.

 

[TesTeq]

This is the one that I lean toward. I don't really believe in the two-minute rule.

Why? Many emails are just Yes/No decisions! You answer Yes or No and you're done. For me it's a 20-second rule!

 

[Jordan]

GettingThingsWon perhaps you have lost sight of the why of email. How much of it is your job, and how much of it is conducive to your actual work?

Remember that, depending on your job, you may have to spend up to an hour and a half keeping your inbox at zero.

If you have an email in your inbox that you think should be a phone call, don't reply to it. You should be picking up the phone yourself and calling that person. This helps to get them into the habit of thinking that if it is urgent, then they need to pick up the phone.

How much of your email is from clients and how much of it is internal? It's usually easier to "train" the internal email senders to send less email or to call if urgent.

Otherwise, the preferred method is adding an appointment to your calendar to get back to inbox zero. 3pm is usually a good time as it gives you a good amount of time to get through your backlog while still being able to get back to people who you need to get back to before EOB.

I can usually break down my emails into the following categories:

- Call X.
- Email Y.
- FYI only. Store in a relevant folder
- This is a long email that needs a longer read. Scan for next actions: you may need to call if the next actions are buried. Add to a Read later folder.
- Irrelevant: Delete.

If you're still having problems it's either a volume problem or a "you're the bottleneck" problem. Can you delegate any of the tasks? Can you make the decisions any faster?

 

[Gardener]

Why? Many emails are just Yes/No decisions! You answer Yes or No and you're done. For me it's a 20-second rule!

Acting on an email, rather than putting it somewhere for action later, distracts me from the flow of processing emails. To my brain, internal decisionmaking and external communication are two different things, and stopping one to do the other slows me down for both. Knowing that I'm not actually going to "do" anything lets me process much faster.

But I also just realized that I also don't have many two-minute emails, much less 20-second emails. Most of my emails are either "do nothing" or "research/ask/look up/think hard". So the payback of using the two-minute rule and being mentally prepared to "do" things would be very small, not worth the loss of flow. If I had lots of quick-answer emails, the payback might be worth it.

 

[Bill Myers]

GettingThingsWon: I process email the way I process anything else: I do actionable items on the spot if they're of the two-minute-or-less variety, and the rest I either delegate (if I can) or defer. Non-actionable items get filed, tickled or trashed. These all work together pretty seamlessly for me. I have not had any difficulty switching between doing/deferring/delegating. Perhaps the issue is that by your own admission you sometimes let it pile up? I find that emptying my inboxes regularly helps me reduce or eliminate my resistance to processing.

When you say you "file" items in @Email to get to inbox zero and then process them, I'm not sure what that means. The whole idea is to zero out your inbox by truly clarifying what each item means to you and organizing (or deleting) it appropriately. If you're merely moving emails out of "in" to another folder without processing them, I don't think that accomplishes much. Yes, your inbox is empty but your psyche still knows there are unprocessed inputs somewhere.

As for whether all of your emails should align with your projects, goals and/or vision: GTD provides us with tools and a framework to cope with the reality that our jobs no longer have clear edges or set-in-stone definitions. It would be nice if I could plan my day by reviewing my mission/goals/vision and aligning all of my activities around them, a la Franklin-Covey and similar systems, but that never worked for me. My job (and my personal life, for that matter) often demands that I be flexible and take care of things that come from left field. GTD enables me to manage those actions efficiently so that I can maintain some semblance of balance, and make sure I'm devoting enough time to the big picture without letting the small stuff fall through the cracks.

When I read forum comments suggesting that all of our actions in our lists should be tied to areas of focus, goals, and visions, I think, "Sounds good, but what if my toilet breaks?" Honestly, fixing a leaky toilet doesn't align with any of my higher-level aspirations, and I don't feel the need to rewrite them so I can accommodate fixing the toilet. Fixing toilets isn't my life's purpose, nor even an area of focus for me. But I need working toilets at home. The same principle applies to work: sometimes stuff comes up that doesn't match my highest aspirations but has to be done anyway. Better to do those things as efficiently as possible than to ignore them until they become fires to put out (or in the case of plumbing, floods to deal with).

Moreover, even if some of the emails that you feel are a drag on your time aren't important to you, perhaps they're important to the sender. You may have knowledge or resources critical for them to do their job. If that's the case, is ignoring them consistent with being a good team member? It's something I try to consider.

If certain people are sending you emails that are truly outside of your area of responsibility, or something they should be able to handle themselves, I would address those things directly either with your co-workers or a manager rather than ignoring them.

I don't know a great deal about you or your work, so some of the above may be off-base. They're my best thoughts based on my understanding of your post but I'm happy to discuss further if you think I've misunderstood something you've written.