I read an interesting article on Life Dev suggesting that you should never check your e-mail first thing in the morning or before bed. The article makes some excellent points, but I’d like to disagree with the solution.

To summarize, the author describes the perils of checking your e-mail at night or first thing in the morning. The core argument is that mail can take a while to get through, with messages like funny videos making it very easy to become derailed for 2 hours just surfing the net. Instead of being productive by checking your mail regularly you are burning up the most precious working hours or staying up too late and not get enough sleep.

All of this rings very true for me. About two years ago I fell in the above trap and combined with online forums I wasted ridiculous amounts of productive time. The result was the feeling that I never had enough time to do what I needed to, constant tiredness from a lack of sleep, and gradually increasing procrastination. Yikes.

Nevertheless the entire time I read the article, rather than nodding my head profusely I found a voice in my head shouting “what if your e-mail is important to your work?”. Being an entrepreneur I don’t have the luxury of turning off work beyond the 9 to 5 timeslots and there is always the possibility of an e-mail in my inbox that either needs to be answered urgently or will drastically reshape my schedule for the day. Knowing what’s coming at me as soon as possible makes it much easier to make good use of my time.

If the idea of not checking your mailbox sounds unrealistic for your situation I’d like to propose an alternative that I’ve successfully used for the past year. I say go ahead and check your e-mail in the morning. Check it before bed. Have your mail client running all day while you work. Give your e-mail as much visibility as you feel you need to be comfortable! The trick is to use a highly underutilized feature of virtually every mail client out there.

The Follow-up E-mail Flag

Virtually all mail clients have this feature. In Outlook it is literally a flag beside each message that you can click. In Gmail it is a star. It provides a very simple way of marking an e-mail message for follow-up along with an easy way to find these messages later.

I actually have two very different e-mail modes. Checking e-mail and responding to e-mail. The first mode can occur at anytime, and since I have my mail client always on and a BlackBerry strapped to my belt, it’s best described as “all the time”. When I check my e-mail I scan over each message very briefly (not everything needs to be fully read right away) and either flag it, leave it, or delete it. If an e-mail is flagged I am comfortable in knowing that I will get back to it at my liesure. Something that is high priority may get an immediate response, but anything else is saved for an appropriate time. I make a mental note of any e-mails with attached actions, allowing me to be aware of what is coming up without necessarily needing to act on it right away.

Not responding to everything is tricky at first as it takes a little bit of discipline to not watch that funny video right away or respond to every single question that someone may have of you. The author of the LiveDev article is perfectly right that doing so will quickly waste the most valuable productivity hours that you have. You also need to get in the habit of checking what messages you have flagged. E-mail clients generally have a separate view, but I’ve gotten in the (possibly bad) habit of simply scrolling through my inbox and watching for flagged messages. I find that needing to flip to a flagged messages only view is a little unintuitive and is a lot more likely to get forgotten.

Bonus E-mail Tip

If you look at my inbox you may become disgusted at the mess that it’s seemingly in. Virtually every undeleted message remains in there, with no real organization. The reality is that I’ve given up on attempting to artificially file messages on arbitrary criteria like the person who sent it or its topic. I was lead to do this after a combination of filing cabinet advice from David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Gmail’s unique tagging model. It turns out that the more places you have to store things, the more places they aren’t when you need them!

I’m confident that the e-mail that I am looking for is in my inbox. If it comes from a certain person I can sort my inbox by name and usually find it that way. The same applies to subject and date, both of which also greatly narrow down the location of an e-mail to a scannable size. If I’m using GMail I tend to simply search for the e-mail as the engine works really well and returns results instantly. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Outlook’s search, which can take several minutes to find what you are looking for. I recommend searching in Outlook as a last resort, and using the sorting function as much as possible.

I should note that I do use folders for certain special messages, like order receipts and automated e-mails. These special cases only get checked in a certain way and in the case of automated e-mail can really clog up an inbox if not dealt with separately. At the time of this writing I only have six such folders.

Got something to say? Leave a response to this post.

 Get the latest updates by subscribing to the feed.

Semi-Related Posts

• Extreme Morning Experiment Final Update
• Extreme Morning Experiment Part 2
• How 1000 People Got ‘lol’ in Their Mailbox
• The Extreme Morning Experiment

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 6:16 am and is filed under Productivity, Links, Organizing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.