The good news is, that I’ve stuck with the email vacation thing I blogged about a few weeks ago. I found a few techniques that have helped me manage this and make it work for me. Let’s take a look at what’s working and the progress I’ve made over the last two months.
When I started trying the email vacations, I would average between 60-70 emails in my inbox. The whole concept of inbox zero was a far-fetched idea. Enter email vacations: concentrated times to check, respond, and manage emails. Now, I average below 40 in my inbox—so I feel like I’ve made progress. And I think inbox zero is achievable.
One of the things that helped the most was to change the frequency my inbox would get new mail. It was set to 5 minutes and is now at 30 minutes. I use Thunderbird as my client, but I’ve found sometimes the email still comes in more often than 30 minutes, and my guess is that it’s because I thread my email. But we’ll see how this effects things.
I’ve find myself checking email about 3-5 times a day. The best part is that I’m more efficient at it. I decided not to go with set times, because my schedule varies each day. But I can plow through my email in 15-30 minute increments. When I flag emails to work on later, I do that in-between vacations. And over the last few weeks, I’ve been able to chip away at the small mountain of email in my inbox.
When I find myself slipping back into old email habits, my stress level tends to go up. As in, I get anxious that as I’m checking email, two more come in. Or that my email volume increases and I don’t have time to address it. That’s why I’ve found the batching of email to be a much better approach.
I’m not as stressed now when I can’t check my email. Getting 20-50 new emails in my inbox doesn’t bother me any more. I scan, absorb the info, and delete what I don’t need. I respond to what needs to be responded to. I’ve been able to successfully change my mentality that email can built up and I can knock it out.
My email vacation technique has been a great approach. And most importantly, my stress level and anxiety towards email has definitely changed for the better.
I try to follow a similar routine during my “work-hours”. A specific slice of time, it was 10 minute intervals at first and now it has inched upwards to 45 minutes at a time. However, what I also do is use filtering. While the Zimbra UI is criminally inefficient in creating filters, I picked up the usage of imapfilters (from Paul Frields, who has a fantastic set-up for offline/online email workflow) and, mercilessly created filters which bring only the “addressed to me directly by folks I know would need a response” into the Inbox. Fortunately, this seems to cut down on the residual mess in the Inbox and, keeps everything sane enough to plow through during intervals. And, my earlier habit of using the smartphone to check/respond_to emails is also receiving a hammer because I’ve turned off push – it synchronizes, but at an interval I control.
Oh yeah, I couldn’t live without email filters. That is a life saver. And I chose not to have work email on my phone. But if I did, I would turn teh push off as well. I probably need to adjust that interval/feature for my gmail. Which bugs me constantly throughout the day with messages.
Thanks for the comment!
Jason