Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [10]
Admittedly, this policy might sound unusual in some offices. Personal e-mail comes first? Yes, it should, and that’s our policy at my consulting firm. We encourage employees to engage their personal e-mail before anything else. The alternative is distasteful—that personal e-mail should wait until all other e-mails are handled, thereby demoting one’s personal relationships below the importance of an interoffice memo. (Of course, this step won’t be relevant to people working at companies that prohibit personal e-mail.)
Bit literacy is a discipline that enables people to work more effectively in the bit world, so as to live more fully outside of it. For practicing the discipline, users deserve this payoff when they check e-mail. Personal messages should come first.
Step 2: Spam
Now that the most relevant e-mail is out of the inbox, find and delete the most irrelevant messages: spam. Bit-literate users must have a strategy for managing spam, either with mail filters or a “white list” service, to delete spam before it ever gets to the inbox.6 Still, a few spam messages may get through the filters. Seek those out—they’re usually easy to spot by their Subject lines—and delete them. Now the inbox is free from the most irrelevant messages.
With the first two steps completed, we have now cleared the inbox of the most relevant, and the most irrelevant, messages. The remaining e-mails aren’t as personally meaningful as a note from a family member, but they now require your full attention. In fact, this third step represents the core of the e-mail method. Lots of people know how to read e-mails from their spouse and delete spam messages; not many people know how to handle the work-related messages that overload them every day. The speed and ease with which you can move through the third step may largely determine how well you perform in your job. This is the real test of e-mail management.
Step 3: Engaging FYIs and Action Items
First, make sure that the inbox messages are sorted by date, with the oldest message on the top of the list. You’ll deal with the oldest message first, and work your way down to the most recent.
Now open each message, from top to bottom of the inbox, engage it as described below, and then file it or delete it from the inbox. Open, engage, move it out; open, engage, move it out; all the way through the inbox. When this step is done, the inbox will be empty.
How to engage a message depends on what type it is. Spam messages and personal mails are already gone from the inbox, and so there are only three types of e-mails left: newsletters, FYIs, and todos. As you march through the inbox, message by message, engage each e-mail as described below, depending on its type.
Newsletters: Read each newsletter quickly, depending on how much time is available, then delete it. If you have very little time and many other e-mails to engage, then quickly scan the headlines and delete it. If you have more time, read more of the newsletter, and feel free to save any part of it that you may need to reference later. But then delete it. Whatever you do, don’t save the newsletter to read later, since when the next issue arrives you’ll then have two issues awaiting your attention. The less you have to read in order to stay informed, the better. (Managing newsletter subscriptions and saving clippings are covered in the media diet chapter.)
FYIs: These are non-actionable messages that are just “for your information”: an answer to a question or a meeting announcement, for example. Meeting announcements may need to be noted on a calendar, and some messages might have to be filed in a project folder for documentation, but most FYIs just need a quick scan.7 In many FYIs your address may appear on the CC line, indicating that this may be optional reading. (Advanced users might prefer to set up filters to automatically send CCs to a separate folder, in order to scan and delete those messages once a day.) Whatever the FYI is, read it if necessary, then delete it or file it; but get it out of