Yesterday I described how I managed my to-do list in the early days of email. Some of the workarounds I came up with were no longer necessary after my company migrated to Microsoft Outlook because the developers of Outlook included nifty features that allow users to convert emails into tasks and manage them as part of their overall to-do list.
Most people don’t know that when they click on the little gray flag — Microsoft calls it the “follow-up flag” — on an email in their inbox, that email gets added to their Outlook task list. Nor do they know that that the subject on that email-based task, which starts out being the same as the subject of the email, can then be edited to describe exactly what needs to be done about that email.
I did a lot of experimenting with how best to use these and other Outlook features to optimize how I managed my to-do list and incoming email. My approach was much informed by David Allen’s 2002 book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, which is the best book out there on how to manage your time and commitments.
After I showed my boss how I was using Outlook, I did some workshops for others at my company to show them my approach and did desk-side coaching for a few of the executives.
Occasionally someone I’d coached would seek me out and ask me a follow-up question — like, “When you get an email like this, what category do you put it in?” I noticed that I was more enlivened by those conversations than I was by anything else I did at work. That was a clue that I should look for opportunities to do more of that kind of coaching after I stopped working full time.
After I retired I went to some non-profit organizations in the area and offering to train their staff, free of charge. I did several of these workshops and loved them. Whenever I had lunch with a former colleague, I’d describe what I was doing. Often as not their response was something like, “Would you do that for my team? I’ll pay you!”
So what started as volunteer work morphed into a paid retirement gig. For about five years I conducted workshops for small groups of executives and other knowledge workers in how to manage the avalanche of email they get each day and how to keep track of everything they have to handle. I’ve almost entirely stopped doing that work now, but just this morning I had a Zoom call with an executive who had recently taken on an expanded accountability and was finding it hard to keep up with his email. He had described his challenges to a friend of mine who suggested that he talk with me. The call this morning was for the purpose of demonstrating my method so he could assess whether it would work for him. He decided it would, and we scheduled a remote one-on-workshop next week.
The reason I’ve mostly stopped doing this kind of work is that I realized I couldn’t solve the biggest problem people have with email — they just get too damn much of it. No matter how smart and organized they are about managing the influx, there’s just no way to stay ahead of hundreds of emails a day. Many of my clients are in meetings most of the day so they deal with their email in the evening, and it takes hours. The practices I teach people are a little like defensive driving. It can go a long way towards keeping you safe, but it’s no substitute for other drivers obeying the traffic laws. By the same token, good email practices may make you as efficient as humanly possible, but there will still be a level of email volume that overwhelms you.
That’s a problem that can’t be solved by any individual worker; it has to be addressed at the level of the enterprise. More on that tomorrow.