Getting your pastoral life organisedPosts in this series
Email can be both exciting and tiresome. It is exciting to receive email. But it can be tiresome to send email.
And sadly the tiresome aspect can make your email inbox an overflowing place of dread.
To get on top of your email and find it a joy to use, I believe you must learn how to process your email appropriately and keep your inbox at zero.
How do you keep your email inbox at zero?
Easy. Process all your emails when you check your mail.
This means setting aside time for processing email. So you should not check email when you don't have sufficient time to process it.
It also means you cannot have email alerts pinging away in the background of your computer or on your phone letting you know when emails arrive. Such notifications will distract you from what you are working on and probably come at a time when you will be tempted to read the email but not action it.
How do you process your emails?
Once you have set aside time to process your email, you need to perform one of the following four actions on every email.
1) Delete it
These are emails that you do read, but once you've read it, you will have no use for again. If there is the slightest chance you will need to refer to it at a future date, don't delete it.
For me, these are mostly advertisements and information on current events.
2) Archive it
These are emails that you may need to read again in the future, but there is no further action required from you at this time. This kind of email goes straight into an archive folder probably never to be touched again.
How do you archive an email? Archiving an email means removing it from your inbox so it is not repeatedly stumbled over and re-read needlessly in the future.
However archiving does not necessarily mean putting the email into some sort of folder system that you have created. I know that in the past people loved creating different archive folders. But these days email software has improved dramatically and so making folders and moving emails around is another big waste of time.
Instead, you should archive all your email into one folder. Then when you want to find an email that you've archived, use the search function in your email program.
Archiving email is very easy with Thunderbird. I simply press the 'A' key on my keyboard and the email is instantly placed in an archive folder for that year. This is a default function of the program. But if your email software doesn't have archive folders, one way around it is to delete all emails and use your trash as your archive (you just need to make sure you never empty the trash!). Thus with one click of the delete key, the email is archived. You then search the trash folder when you're looking for an email.
3) Reply immediately and archive it
This action depends on how much time you have set aside to check your email. As a general rule, I would reply immediately when the reply would take less than two minutes to compose.
This one rule will reduce the size of your email inbox dramatically, as most emails do not require lengthy replies. You just need to stop procrastinating and answer them.
4) Add an action to your to-do list and archive it
Some emails have to do with projects and require further actions which do not involve replying, or at least not straight away.
Now you could leave such emails in your inbox to remind you of what you need to do. But putting the actions required from the email on a to-do list is a much better idea. It means that your tasks are in one place and not mixed between your email and your other lists. It also means your description of the action is probably more nuanced and quicker to comprehend than what someone else has written in an email - which saves you time when you get around to actioning the task.
Now some emails fall into this category simply because they require a lot of time to compose a response. This may be because you need to compose it over several days with multiple drafts (I think many pastoral emails fall into this category and much harm can be avoided if certain emails are composed carefully over a lengthy period). But again, reminders about working on these emails should be on your to-do list, not in your inbox.
Conclusion
If you do one of those four things to every email, your inbox will sit at zero. Emails will have been appropriately deleted or archived and anything that needs to be done will be on your to-do list, not cluttering up your email inbox.
This all leads to greater redemption of time and a pleasant feeling of self control.
If you want to read further tips on handling email, this helpful post at the What's Best Next blog was my first introduction to email efficiency.
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