60 Emails a Day or Less

For a long time I’ve struggled with finding a way to process my email inbox without having to do it in the wee hours of the night or…

For a long time I’ve struggled with finding a way to process my email inbox without having to do it in the wee hours of the night or morning. Undoubtedly others share this challenge as there are numerous blog posts, articles, and books on the topic of efficiently processing email and not letting it take command of your day. What I’ve discovered for myself is simple: you can’t actually process as many emails per day as you think.

Suppose you’re a subscriber to Inbox Zero and David Allen’s Getting Things Done tips, then you probably try to process any/every email that takes less than three minutes immediately when you encounter it. For a long time I have successfully followed this set of ideas and achieved a feeling among colleagues that I am responsive, reliable, etc. For me, it didn’t even get in the way of the big things because I’m fairly ruthless about focusing on top priorities during core business hours but it did leave me wondering why I was always up late responding, and I wanted to reclaim that time for other more important things.

So I created this simple spreadsheet on a hunch that I was lying to myself and everything became clear.

The reality is that even if we only focus on the quick email items ( and none of us have only quick ones in our inboxes) then processing more than about 60 emails at three minutes each adds up incredibly fast-three hours per day in this rudimentary example. I’ve tried to figure out the average number of emails a busy startup person deals with each day, and it’s hard to put a precise number on it without audit log access and invading folk’s privacy, but I know from my experience that hundreds of messages incoming and between 50–60 outgoing is fairly common each day. The math becomes simple at this point and the takeaway is extremely clear-the only way that would work is if I spent 7+ hours a day on email, which is nuts because we all have jobs to do and while email may be a part of many of those, it’s rarely the job.

The prescription for dealing with this isn’t rocket science, but sometimes we already know the prescription but don’t believe it enough to really do it (take for example that we all know exercise and eating well are important and most of us would crush that plan after a scary doctor’s visit but otherwise ignore the recommendation). Now we have the data to make clear that we need to either accept a huge number of hours per day doing email (gulp!) or really take seriously the following ideas:

1. Use inbox rules like crazy to filter signal from noise

2. When approaching the inbox, start with messages from the recipients that really matter to you first (ex: everything from your boss, your reports, or folks you are currently doing a project with)

3. And the scariest for those of us who are fans of excellent execution: completely ignore some percentage of the messages-odds are good that if your opinion on the thing really matters, someone will call/chat/re-send just as you would if you needed the answer.

Originally published at http://adamjudelson.com on July 19, 2016.