email management – Andrew Bolwell

Keeping track of all your to-dos is never easy, but implementing a process and system to manage them can really help you function at your optimal capacity.

I recently shared a strategy outlining how to:

Archive all your email so you never have to worry about deleting an email again
Declutter your inbox
Process your inbox
Track everything you delegate and everything you are ‘waiting for’ via a Pending folder.

In this post, I’ll cover managing and tracking your next actions so you never have to worry about dropping the ball again.

As mentioned previously, efficiently processing your inbox involves doing one of four things with each email:

Read and delete. No action is needed.
Do. If I think it will take me less than 2 minutes to respond to an email, I will do it then and there and then delete it.
Delegate. Forward, ask someone to do something based on the email, and then delete it. Per my previous post on this topic, remember to copy yourself when you delegate over email so you can track everything you’re waiting on someone for in your Pending folder.
Queue up for the next action needed. These are the emails I need to spend more time on and that I haven’t been able to delete, delegate, or do within the 2-minute rule.

Let’s focus on that last point: how to queue up things for the next action needed.

Constructing contexts

One core tenet of “Getting Things Done” is to group all your next actions by context. In its simplest terms, this means defining a set of mutually exclusive categories that you can use to group and prioritize your subsequent actions.

Everyone will have different contexts they want to work across (see below for mine). The trick here is to define those contexts in a way that makes sense for you and is as simple as possible. It is also important to define them so that each next action only goes into one context. This keeps the overhead of managing your next actions to a minimum.

Here are mine:

I implement this for my email by creating an email folder for each “context” and then moving each “next action” from my inbox to that folder.

Here are a few examples:

My friend emails me and wants to catch up. I drag the email from my inbox into my Call folder.
My wife emails me and asks if I can pick up paper towels. That goes in my Urgent/Important folder 😊
My colleague emails me and requests I review a presentation, but in no hurry. It goes into my Not Urgent/Important folder.
Someone sends me an interesting article on Vegemite. Into the Someday folder it goes.
My boss emails me and says he wants to discuss an upcoming site visit. This goes into the Agenda folder for when I meet with him next.
One of my team members told me they just finished a presentation to an important client. This goes into the Recognize folder.

Hopefully, you get the idea.

Later, when I get ready to go on a drive, I check my Calls folder and call my friend.

When I next meet with my boss, I go to my Agendas folder to remind myself of everything I need to discuss with him.

When I’m at my desk first thing in the morning, I hit my Urgent/Important folder for all the urgent and important things I need to do.

When I finish those, I hit the Not Urgent/important folder and get a start on those.

Then, when I’m done with all my projects and have time to breathe, I check my Someday folder for new things to do.

Never drop the ball again.

Creating a code

The above works great when you receive and act on emails, but what if you want to create and manage the next actions for things not associated with an email you have received?

For example, you might think of something urgent and essential you must do or someone you need to call. How do you get these follow-up actions into your email system?

Here’s what I do.

Let’s take an “urgent/important” next action as an example. If I want to remind myself to complete an important presentation by the end of the week, I email myself the Subject line “Complete presentation $ui.” I then have a rule set that looks for emails from myself with a “$ui” in the subject line, which automatically moves that email into my Urgent/Important folder. Voila! Next time I’m at my laptop, I will check my Urgent/Important folder, and see my next action to complete the presentation.

To break this down further, for each context:

Come up with a code you can put in the Subject for any next action you want to automatically move to the folder for that context.
Create a rule for the context that will look for that code as part of the Subject and then do the move.

For the example above, the rule would look like this:

Note: The examples in this post are from Microsoft Outlook, but most other email applications allow similar rules and settings

Below are the codes I use for all the contexts mentioned above. All you need to do now is create a rule for each code that is the same as the example above but with the corresponding code for each context.

With the above in place, you can also handle the following scenario:

Someone sends you an email to ask you for something, and when you respond to say, “I’m on it!” you tag the subject with “$ui”, so your next action is automatically put in your Urgent/Important folder for follow-up. This saves you from having to respond AND manually move the original email to the folder yourself. Yes, it’s only a few extra steps, but it all adds up over a day, a week, or a year. And these posts are all about being an email ninja, not an email grasshopper.

Final reminders

Two more things and we’re done, but these are very important to remember.

First, the ordering of your rules in your email system matters. It’s essential that the first rule is to move all received emails to your Received folder. This ensures you will continue to archive all emails you receive, as explained in my first post. Then come the rules to manage context-based next actions as explained above. Finally, the last rule should be to manage Pending emails, which you copy yourself on when you want to track or monitor that something gets done. Ordering your rules in this way ensures they are applied in the correct order so that the system works.

Second, you will need to update your Pending rule so as not to move all these next-action emails to your Pending folder as well. To do this, simply exclude all these emails from the Pending rule, as shown below.

That’s it! Now, you have a way to track your next actions by context. When you complete each next action, you can delete it from the context folder and move on to the next one!

At this point, you now have a way to:

Archive all your emails so you never have to worry about deleting them again.
Declutter your inbox.
Process your inbox.
Track everything you delegate and everything you are ‘waiting for’ via a Pending folder.
Track your next actions by context.

Stay tuned for my next post on using this system to manage projects and deliverables that require many next actions to complete. It will also include a few additional advanced techniques that will move you into black belt territory.

Automate your Inbox so you have time for more meaningful tasks

Who doesn’t want to be more productive? When the end of your day rolls around, are you looking at your to-do list, wishing you could cross off more items? In my experience, I’ve discovered the most productive people do things differently. They use their time more efficiently and often achieve better results.

If you’re struggling to find time for the more meaningful tasks in your day and want to spend less time tied to emails, I’m sharing these tips for you.

If you’re into personal productivity, then Getting Things Done is a must-read. The author, David Allen, is widely recognized as the world’s leading expert on personal and organizational productivity.

The book inspired me to create an email system that lets me spend less time on emails and more time on meaningful tasks. Here are my tips around email and how to make it work for you. In order to succeed at making the most of your email, you’re going to need two things:

An email program (I use Outlook, so that is what I’ll be highlighting today)
Time (Don’t worry, it won’t take much of your time once you get the system established!)

So, without further ado, here’s how I set up my email to maximize my time:

Create a reliable archive for everything you send and receive. Create a folder called “Received” to archive every email you receive so that you always have a copy on hand, no matter what happens. Create a rule to automatically make a copy of everything you receive, except emails that you send to yourself, as those will be automatically archived in your Sent folder (I’ll explain that in a minute).

In Outlook, this rule might look like this:

At this point, a copy of every email you send will be in Sent, and a copy of every email you receive will be in Received. You’ll never have to worry about deleting an email again. Just follow one rule — don’t touch either of these folders, and you’ll always have a copy saved.

Additional tip: There’s no need to create a similar archive for things you send, as most email programs take care of this for you via the Sent folder.

This provides a few benefits:

You can now use your Inbox as a real Inbox and not as a way of archiving your emails. For example, you can now delete things from your Inbox without worrying about saving a copy.
You don’t have to create some complicated folder structure to store and find emails. You can simply use your email’s Search function across both the Sent and Received folders to search and find any email you’ve ever sent or received. More on this later.

Next, in order to get all the useless emails out of your Inbox and focus on the important stuff, you can use a service like Sanebox. Sanebox does many things, but the best thing it does is learn what you consider important and interesting and move everything else out of your Inbox into a folder called SaneLater. This means that everything left in your Inbox is the things you find most important, and the rest you can process periodically at the end of the day.

If you’re using Outlook, another way to do this is to simply use Outlook’s “Focused Inbox” to automatically sort messages into Focused (important) and Other (not important).

With all the above in place, your Inbox will only contain emails of interest at this point. Now onto processing those emails. For every email remaining, I will take one of the following actions:

Read and delete. No further action is needed.
Do. If I think it will take me less than 2 minutes to respond to an email, I will do it then and there and then delete it.
Delegate. Forward and ask someone to do something based on the email, and then delete it.
Queue up. These are the emails I need to spend more time on and that I haven’t been able to delete, delegate, or do within the 2-minute rule mentioned above.

The really fun part (have I mentioned how much I love productivity tips?) is how to set up email to streamline how you manage all the things you’ve delegated and all the next actions you have on your plate.

Let’s start with how I use email to track everything I’ve delegated and everything I’m waiting for:

Create a folder called “Pending” to store every email request you make that you want to track the result of, or monitor that it gets done.
Create a rule that automatically moves any email you receive from yourself to the Pending folder created in the previous step.

Now, all you need to do is copy yourself on any email you send where you want to track or monitor progress. This will trigger the above rule and store all the emails in the Pending folder.

You can then periodically (daily, weekly, whenever) look at the Pending folder for every ‘waiting for’ action you are tracking. When something gets done, simply delete it from the Pending folder! Remember, no need to worry about saving emails anymore, every email you have ever sent and received is safely archived in Sent and Received.

And voila! You now have:

A way to archive all your email so you never have to worry about deleting an email again
A way to unclutter your Inbox
A way to process your Inbox
A way to track everything you delegate and everything you are ‘waiting for’

Stay tuned for the next blog post on how to manage and track all your next actions so you never have to worry about dropping the ball again. In future blog posts, I’ll also cover my approach to personal knowledge management and how I manage my “Second Brain” to stay productive and free my mind from worrying about all the things going on in my life.

Keeping track of all your to-dos is never easy, but it’s within your power to foster a process and system that helps you function at your optimal capacity.

This is what works for me. What works for you? What are your productivity tips for managing your to-do list?