One little-noted fact about email is that no one teaches you how to use it. Email started out as a speedy and convenient way of exchanging written messages without all the fuss of printing and mailing them. As such there wasn’t much to learn. In an hour or two you could pick up everything you needed to know about composing, sending, receiving, filing, and deleting emails.
For many people, in their personal lives, that’s still what email is — albeit with a lot more unwanted messages to sort through than we used to get. But at the office, email has morphed into a mammoth, all-purpose system for coordinating virtually all knowledge work. Dealing with email consumes what seems to be an ever-increasing portion of our workday. And yet over the course of this transformation, almost no thought has been given to how this increasingly pervasive system should be used, and what the best practices are for managing the flood of emails that contemporary knowledge workers receive every day. Some thought has been given to finding alternatives to email, but most of these, like Slack, don’t address the core problem that knowledge workers are inundated with digital communications, any of which might generate a professional obligation that needs to be tracked and managed.
Back when we received 20 or 30 emails a day, many of us developed a way of triaging incoming messages. We acted on those that we could deal with quickly, and those that we didn’t immediately have time for, we left in our inbox to be dealt with later. That’s still how most people triage their email today, but as the volume of email has grown, that approach has become less and less viable. It results in dozens or hundreds of actionable emails accumulating in workers’ inboxes with no visual cues as to their relative urgency or importance.
Today there is a plethora of digital task managers that can be used to keep track of the myriad actions and projects that a contemporary knowledge worker is responsible for. Each of these applications has its strengths and weaknesses, but they all allow users to collect, categorize, and manage lists of everything they need to do.
But most knowledge workers don’t use task management software. Almost everything they need to handle comes to them in the form of an email. And the way they keep track of them is to collect them in their email inbox and work on them as time allows.
But imagine that the devil’s own software designer set out to create a task manager. Imagine that his job was to design the most devilishly disempowering and maddening piece of software ever written. What that minion of Satan might come up with would bear a striking resemblance to your email inbox.
First, of course, is the fact that you need to wade through all kinds of extraneous rubbish to uncover the items that are important. What kind of task manager would display hundreds of new items each day and require that you sort through them to determine which ones belong on your to-do list and which are irrelevant to you?
Then there’s the fact that the subject lines on your incoming emails rarely describe clearly what you need to do about them. You’ve probably reopened some emails numerous times to remind yourself what they are. Then you conclude, again, that you don’t have time to address that particular message right now, close it and leave it in your inbox, where you’ll later reopen it to once again to remind yourself of what you need to do with it. Could anything be less efficient?
In addition, the emails in your inbox are arranged in the order in which they arrived, not in priority order. The least important thing could be at the top of the list and the most critical hidden well below the bottom of the screen.
What’s more, nothing in your email inbox provides a visual clue as to when it’s due. Something you need to finish this afternoon could be indistinguishable from something that doesn’t need to be handled before April.
And finally there’s the fact that anyone can add something to your “task list” at any time. In fact, the system is designed to provide more visibility to what other people want from you than what you yourself consider important. (Some people have taken to sending themselves an email about something they need to get done so that it has the same visibility as the work demands made by everyone else.)
In short, millions of knowledge workers are using the most diabolically dysfunctional task manager imaginable. As a result, their work life is filled with stress and anxiety. They know there are ticking time-bombs buried in the pile of emails sitting in their inbox, things they’ve forgotten about but which are going to cause all kinds of grief if they’re not unearthed before it’s too late. Deadlines are missed, balls are dropped, and more and more workers spend hours on nights and weekends trying to dig themselves out and get a handle on everything they have to do.
And yet it has occurred to almost no one in corporate America that this is a systemic problem. It’s considered an issue of personal productivity — some people are just better organized than others. Companies that would never expect employees to use the T&E system without being fully trained think nothing of leaving them on their own to figure out how to deal with the piece of software they use more than any other — their email.
As a result, those employees who have figured out how to organize their work outside the morass of the email inbox are more productive and enjoy greater peace of mind than their less fortunate co-workers. But because these innovative workers are in the minority, the overall enterprise is considerably less productive than it could be.
This entire situation could be addressed at two levels. First, companies could teach their workers how to deal with their incoming email and keep track of all the tasks and projects that email represents. Incoming email has to be processed such that everything actionable is transferred to a true task manager and everything else is either filed away or deleted. A stress-free work life starts with an empty inbox. That’s not as cumbersome and time-consuming as it may seem. Microsoft Outlook, which most organizations use for email, has features for flagging emails with a single click, causing them to appear on a separate task list. And once it’s on the task list, the email’s subject line can be edited to describe what needs to be done, a due date and priority can be assigned and a category applied. Dozens of emails can thus be processed in just a few minutes, with those that are actionable going on a dedicated task list and everything else being removed from the inbox.
But as I’ve said, most people don’t know about these features or don’t know how to use them productively. My “retirement gig” has involved training knowledge workers in how to use Outlook this way, and I’ve done workshops on it for hundreds of people, but every company should be providing this kind of training to its employees as a matter of course.
The second way this entire situation could be addressed is for companies to move away from using email as the all-purpose means of coordinating knowledge work. Most companies have workflow systems for managing standard business processes, like purchasing, expense reporting, and performance reviews, but core processes — those that actually create value for the business — remain ad-hoc. There is an assumption that knowledge work requires absolute autonomy on the part of its practitioners, and that they would rebel at any attempts to routinize their work.
But while some aspects of knowledge work do require flexibility and autonomy — you can’t automate the discovery of a new drug, for instance — many things knowledge workers do would benefit from dedicated workflow systems, which would significantly reduce the volume of email they deal with. I’m looking forward to a book Cal Newport is coming out with in March that addresses this topic in detail. It’s called A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. Any executive who suspects that the way email is used today represents a drag on their company’s productivity, not to mention their employees’ well-being, should pre-order that book.
In the meantime, everyone who deals with large volumes of email at work should start finding ways to extract their tasks and projects from their email and manage them outside of their email inbox.