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As I’ve mentioned before, it’s difficult for us, as mere human beings, to maintain our effectiveness when we try to switch rapidly between multiple tasks.  It’s nothing to be ashamed of…it’s just how the species is wired.  We’re not computers, after all.

Still, it would be a mistake to say that people should never multitask.  Situations exist where multitasking actually makes sense.

For example, take the following combinations of activities.

1. Eating and talking to friends or colleagues
2. Exercising and watching TV
3. Driving and listening to audio books

All of the above combinations work relatively well together.  If multitasking is bad, then why does exercising and watching TV seem OK on an instinctual level?

Successful multitasking has a simple general pattern.  To multitask effectively, you simply combine an activity which requires minimal mental involvement with another activity that requires minimal to moderate involvement.

Luckily or unluckily, people often have to perform a lot of activities that don’t take a lot of brainpower.  It is precisely during these types of activities where we have the opportunity to take back the most time.  The big benefit of multitasking is that if you combine two activities into the same period of time, you’re basically getting an extra life-enhancing activity in for free.  Multitasking may not be the best idea when you’re trying to compose an artfully thought out e-mail, but there’s no such thing watching TV badly.

One last note…it’s also possible to multitask when you’ve trained enough in a particular situation to the point where doing the right thing is like being on autopilot.  The best analogy I can use is the act of learning to ride a bicycle or play a video game.  Many activities that require some thinking up front eventually require little to no conscious mental involvement once we’ve familiarized ourselves with the activity.  A beginner at chess is just thinking about which pieces are allowed to move where.  An expert, on the other hand, has those details on autopilot.  He’s able to think about a whole range of other things like what the opponent is going to do next, the relative strength of his current position, past similar situations and how they turned out, etc.

Of course, training to the level of an expert can take a lot of effort and time, and in any situation that requires a little creativity, you have to bring your full attention back to the situation at hand.

Anyway, hopefully you now understand that multitasking definitely has its merits when done correctly.  We’ll talk in the next article about one of my favorite ways to multitask…listening to audio books and driving to work.

This post is the second post in a series on how to manage your e-mail.  The first post is here.

Tip #3 – Use a “Getting Things Done” workflow for managing e-mail.

I’m a huge fan of the “Getting Things Done” system for managing commitments, and managing e-mail using GTD’s workflow definitely works.  Here are some specific guidelines for setting up your e-mail according to GTD.

1. Set up GTD folders.

Create a folder called “Action Required” under your Inbox. Then create a folder called “Reference” under your Inbox.  Organize and create any extra subfolders under Reference as necessary…this is like your filing system for e-mails and depends mostly on personal preference.

2. Move all your existing e-mail out of your Inbox and into the Action Required or Reference folders.

One of the big principles of this system is keeping your Inbox empty.  So, if you have stuff already sitting in your Inbox, you need to move it out.  Decide whether each e-mail needs to be acted on, and either move it to Action Required or Reference as necessary.

3. Moving forward, keep the Inbox empty by filing incoming e-mails.

Always move new e-mails to the Action Required folder or Reference folder after you’ve read them and figured out whether action needs to be taken.

The analogy David Allen uses for an empty Inbox is the blinking answering machine light.  When there’s an e-mail in your Inbox, the light is blinking.  The way to stop the blinking is to grab the e-mail and file it correctly.  If your answering machine light was blinking all the time, it wouldn’t be much use…and so it is with an Inbox that you leave items in.  Your Inbox has to be emptied, or why do you have it in the first place?

Now, you might be asking…what does doing this buy me?  Allow me to explain further.

The “normal” e-mail workflow…why it doesn’t work

Let’s take a look at a typical inbox.
The problem with an inbox where every e-mail stays in the inbox by default is that your commitments (aka the
stuff you need to be taking care of to avoid irritating other people) are
completely intermingled with e-mails that you’ve already taken care of
and other e-mails that you never ever need to look at again.

What happens all too often with an inbox lacking in GTD organization is the following.

1. User receives e-mail, reads e-mail, decides he needs to do something with it but can’t get to it right this instant.
2. User checks inbox several times over the next few days. The important e-mail in question continues to drift further down the list. Meanwhile, every time the user scans his e-mail, the important e-mail is visually drowned out by the white noise of the surrounding crap, AND the user wastes time scanning through e-mails that have already been taken care of trying to remember what still needs doing.
3. Several days later, the user eventually forgets about the e-mail becuase he’s busy dealing with some other e-mail that he got an hour ago. Oh well, hope nobody really needed that information!

Now, does that sound familiar to you?  I’m betting it does.  I’ve seen it happen with many folks, and, honestly, it used to happen to me too.  It’s not the best way of handling e-mail.

There’s usually a person on the other end that was waiting for you to reply. When you don’t, it slowly, but surely, lowers your capital with them.  Conversely, when you know how to deal with every e-mail responsibly, people begin to exhibit trust in you.  They know you’ll move the ball forward…and that’s equally good for building your reputation with co-workers and friends.

Here’s a better way to deal with e-mails.

The Getting Things Done e-mail workflow…why it works

Let’s look at the advantages afforded by using the Action Required and Reference folders.

The workflow I described before essentially forces you to decide which e-mails are commitments and which ones aren’t. Any commitment you have needs to be in a single place where you know you won’t forget about it.  Hence the Action Required folder.

The benefits of organizing this way are:

1. You cannot forget to take action on something, since everything you need to take action on is all in one place. Instead of having to remember where each individual e-mail is that you needed to do something with, the only thing you need to remember is to look at your Action Required folder once in a while.

If you want to get work done, you just go to the “Action Required” folder and start hacking away. Suddenly, your co-workers are calling you Mister Reliable because you don’t miss anything.

2. There is now a clear visual warning sign whenever you are overcommitting yourself.

The amount of e-mail you get doesn’t necessarily correlate well with your workload, so having e-mails scrolling down your window doesn’t raise any red flags. Heck, everyone’s e-mail boxes are overflowing…it’s normal! The amount of stuff in your “Action Required” list, on the other hand, is directly correlated. If you have a scrollbar showing up in your action required folder, you’ve definitely got some work to do, buddy.

For me, if I have over 15-20 e-mails in the “Action Required” list, I know I either need to buckle down or start warning people off when they ask me to do more stuff. Usually it’s a combination of both.

3. You don’t have to keep wasting mental effort looking at e-mails you’ve already dealt with. Wasting a few seconds here and there glancing through old e-mails isn’t the biggest problem…the real danger is that legitimate e-mails that need action from you get drowned out by the sea of other e-mails.

Hopefully, I’ve done a good job of explaining why organizing e-mail in this fashion works so damn well.  Trust me, this really helps.

Tip #4 – Use filters to help sort automated e-mails from actual people e-mails.

Most automated e-mails and mailing lists require no response from you whatsoever and have much lower priority compared to e-mails from people.  Therefore, having to sort through them all the time is usually more distracting than beneficial.  My suggestion to you is to use rules or filters to route those e-mails directly to your Reference folder.  That way, you can read them at your leisure without mixing them in with your potential commitments.

In Outlook, you can accomplish this by going to “Tools/Rules and Alerts…”

And then setting up the appropriate filters in this dialog.

Tip #5 – Know when to use e-mail

E-mail, in the grand scheme of things, is a relatively new medium of communication.  It is not the best, any more than you would call a plane better than a car.  And it’s not the worst…any more than you would call a bike worse than a car.  It is important to remember that e-mail took hold because it filled some gaps in the way that people communicate. When you move away from those strengths, you start losing what made e-mail good for communicating in the first place.

It’s actually fairly important for everyone to understand when e-mail adds value to communication vs when it doesn’t.  Let’s dig into that statement.

Most of the time, using e-mail is just fine…you send a document around and ask people to take a look, or you check in with friends and ask them to get back to you at their convenience.

But have you ever heard jokes/horror stories about employees getting berated or even fired over e-mail?  The manager who sends those e-mails is a classic example of someone who doesn’t understand the rules of communication. Although criticism is sometimes warranted, you can at least communicate some level of maturity, respect and constructiveness face to face as you offer feedback.  That sort of dual meaning is nearly impossible to communicate over e-mail…it’s just outright criticism.  And, of course, firing someone over e-mail is simply a cop-out of egregious proportions.  Not only can you not show maturity or respect in such a situation, but any manager who does such a thing brings real risk on himself and the company.  A recent HBR article shows that employees tend to file complaints not based on the actual merits, but on whether or not they felt they were treated respectfully and fairly.  Misusing e-mail can literally be an expensive mistake!

When you misuse e-mail, at best, you simply waste someone’s time.  At worst, you irritate, offend, and escalate situations inappropriately.  That’s why understanding the strengths and weaknesses of e-mail is important.

Here’s a simple list of the pros and cons of e-mail as a medium of communication.

• Good because you can fire and forget.  Before e-mail, you had to send letters to people or call them.  Thankfully, there’s virtually no reason to send a letter now as opposed to sending an e-mail.  E-mails are easier to send, cost virtually nothing, and get there nearly instantaneously.  As for the phone, calling people often costs money and requires you to be prepared for a potentially lengthy discussion…and you have to try repeatedly to get a hold of the person in question if they aren’t available.  If the situation isn’t urgent, the fire and forget style of e-mail is much easier on the sender and the receiver.
• Good for detailed communication or attaching documents.  You can send a whole lot of detailed electronic information over e-mail as easily as you can a few sentences, and that’s important.  For example, if I’ve written a detailed product spec or taken notes at a meeting, I’m not going to try to read the thing to someone over the phone.  Score one for e-mail!
• Good for one-to-many communications.  Need to tell a whole bunch of people something? E-mail is a great way to do it. Calling a meeting takes a lot of steps and is often too much effort relative to what you need to say.  Using the phone? You’d have to call each and every person and hope you got a hold of them.
• Bad for urgent communication.  Most people don’t live on e-mail.  Even if some people do, most of the time you probably don’t know who they are.  As I stated previously, in a proper organizational culture, the majority of people will not be checking their e-mail constantly…they’ll be figuring out and implementing your next big thing.  That’s a good thing…let them do it!  My point is, if you need a response quickly, use the phone, IM, or just walk up and say hi.  That’s the most effective thing you can do, and it’s respectful to boot!
• Bad for figuring out or hashing out problems.  Brainstorming, dialogue, and understanding are facilitated heavily by rich communication channels.  That’s why complicated or vague matters should be handled face to face or over the phone.  First, because in unclear situations you run a very high risk of parties misunderstanding other parties and confusing the problem solving process.  Second, because complex discussions change direction so rapidly, the cycle of feedback that normally takes place very quickly in a face to face situation will often take place incredibly slowly over e-mail.

My opinion?  If most of your communication with team members is over e-mail, it usually means something is wrong.  Teams need to communicate face to face to build momentum and  gel with each other.  In many teams…and especially in software development, difficult problem solving is a daily fact of life.  Trying to get that done over e-mail only slows that process down.

It’s usually OK to handle more communication with external parties over e-mail, as long as you keep in mind that there are appropriate times to transition to phone calls and meetings.

Conclusion

I think that about wraps up my little series here on e-mail.  The bottom line is that e-mail is a wonderful tool for communicating with other people, and I wouldn’t want to live without it.  But, as with many things, there are good ways to use it, and bad ways to use it as well.  I hope that by reading these articles, you’ve gained some understanding of how to avoid the distractions and pitfalls of e-mail.  Once you understand those, you can focus
on taking advantage of e-mail in ways that enhance your productivity and respect the time of others.

Thanks for reading!

A few months ago, I did a “Getting Things Done” presentation for the team here at SnapStream.  As I’ve mentioned before, GTD is a system developed by David Allen for organizing and dealing with your tactical commitments.  The presentation focused on two things…the concepts of Getting Things Done, and specific recommendations on how to implement Getting Things Done at our company.

The recommendations in the second part of the presentation were synthesized by me based around some simple concepts about communication and the various modes of communication we engage in.

Introduction

So while this post is mainly about e-mail, I do need to set everything up with some background information first.

The concepts were:

• Knowledge work requires large and uninterrupted blocks of time
• Interruptions cost about 15 minutes of time
• “Rich” channels are best suited for certain kinds of discussions, but also waste the most time.

The last point probably warrants some explanation.  “Rich” channels are those channels where you can communicate with more than just words.  Face to face is the richest, followed by phone, etc.

You often hear that anywhere from sixty to eighty percent of communication is non-verbal.  Zig Ziglar gives an excellent example in one of his seminars where he says a sentence eight different ways…and you’ll have to excuse me, because I don’t recall the exact phrase, but it goes something like

“I did not say that he struck your friend”

Try placing emphasis on different words of the sentence and you’ll see that the meaning of the sentence changes completely.  And that’s not all…gesticulations, the face…many factors contribute to our understanding of another person besides just actual words.

In the The Naked Face, a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell recounts how Paul Ekman, a professor who has researched and produced a complete catalog of facial expressions, has also actually mastered the ability to read people through those expressions.

The point is, non-verbal communication matters…and possibly more than you thought it did.

Anyway, moving forward.  The modes of communication were:

• Meetings and conversations
• Phone calls
• E-mail
• Instant messaging
• Paper

And there’s the setup for my next few articles.

Let’s talk about e-mail, shall we? 🙂

We use Microsoft Outlook here, but many of these techniques can be translated to other programs…the concepts are what’s important.

Tip #1 – Define specific times to check your e-mail.

Which really means, don’t check your e-mail all the time.  The ability to maintain a singular focus is important in reaching your flow state…and if you maintain habits that constantly distract you, you’re simply doing yourself a disservice.  Checking your e-mail is often one of those habits.  See the 15 minute rule bout distractions above.

I recommend setting aside specific times of the day to deal with e-mail when you’re already breaking flow anyway.  Usually, that means when you get into work, after a meal, and perhaps, right before you leave.

Do you have people in your company that expect you to live on e-mail because they do?  Remind them respectfully of why you manage your time differently.  At SnapStream, we’ve tried to establish cultural boundaries about time…and that’s important, because a lot of people are just not comfortable saying “Hey, I’m not going to get to that until later” to other people. But respecting the time of your fellow coworkers and your own time as well is important. It has to be cultural at any company.  It has to be explicitly OK.

There’s only one good exception to this rule, and that’s when external customers or partners operate differently and expect instantaneous responses to e-mails.  In that case, the appropriate thing to do is to have a person in the company responsible for filtering and managing these communications so that the rest of the organization can get actual work done.

If you think that the above isn’t you and somehow you still need to live on e-mail, I’d strongly suggest considering your case for it.  Be honest with yourself.  Obviously,  I can’t tell you what side of the line you’re on, but what I can do is remind you that most people in an organization should not be living on e-mail.  So, at the very least, take stock of your organization and see if the percentage is too high…that might force you to think a little harder about who should be doing what.

Tip #2 – Disable automatic e-mail downloading and alerts

The corollary to not checking your e-mail all the time is that you must also make sure the e-mail program doesn’t keep checking your e-mail for you.  Again, the interruptions only serve to distract and break your focus.

Unfortunately, most programs enable these notifications by default, and that’s because, in general, people like programs that behave as if they are doing something cool.  Additionally, getting a new e-mail, for many folks, is the equivalent of a little digital self-validation.  It says, “Hey, someone out there might have liked me enough to e-mail me today.”

That’s good for warm fuzzy feelings…but taking hits from the digital crack pipe is hell on personal productivity.  And again, unfortunately, I have to be realistic here and acknowledge that the warm fuzzy feelings win out for most people.  I surmise that most people haven’t thought about their own productivity hard enough to derive any sort of pleasure from turning the notifications off…I’ve seen far too many people rationalize dumber things already.  So while I don’t like the default configurations of e-mail programs, I guess I can’t blame the companies who make the programs either…at a superficial level, it’s what people want.

Now on to specific recommendations for Microsoft Outlook.

First you want to go to Tools/Options.

Next, click on E-Mail Options.

Then, click on Advanced E-mail Options.

Finally, uncheck all those accursed notifications.

Congratulations, you’ve just freed yourself from the digital crack pipe!  Read and deal with e-mail on your own terms.

OK…this post is running long, so I’m going to split this into two parts.  Part 2 coming soon…

Update: The second part is now available.

As I move on from the inaugural tip, I feel I should mention that I write these tips from the context of what is right for me.  I do not claim to know you personally or know exactly what’s right for you.  Nevertheless, I have synthesized my opinions from a fairly large base of feedback over time, and they are, in my opinion, correct.  There is the off chance that one of the tips may, somehow, not work for your particular situation.  But, I strongly believe that you, the reader, will be far better off implementing all the tips and dealing with the few that don’t quite fit your situation than you will be doing nothing at all.

Now on to this tip.  I was inspired to choose the minimalist philosophy as the next topic after seeing Raymond Chen post about his office and a subsequent post about another minimalist office.  Great posts, please read them!

Being minimalist, to me, means that I’m constantly throwing away things that no longer add value to my life.  And that I strive to only purchase those things which will add ongoing, lasting value to myself.

I initially did not choose to be minimalist.  Rather, I chose to start a startup, and living in a minimalist fashion found its way to me after that.  The company needed money, not me.  And it would have seemed very strange for me to worry at all about myself while the team was sacrificing to get SnapStream off the ground.

Honestly, I probably could have spent more money if I wanted to.  I come from a middle class background and it would not have been difficult to spend a few more dollars a month.  But it would not have been right, nor would it have sent the right message.

Eventually, I came to realize something interesting.  I was still alive, and I was still pretty happy.  What was going on here?

Prior to my time starting SnapStream, I used to spend a lot of time and money shipping things back from college to home, and vice versa.  I most likely spent more money then than I do now, although I’ve never really been a huge spender.  It was quite unpleasant sending things back and forth, and after a while, I realized how much time and effort I was wasting doing it.

Afterwards, I did some consulting work and traveled a lot.  Again, you can’t take much with you.  But I was still pretty happy.  I got to hang out with friends and co-workers, and as long as I had an internet connection in the hotel room, I could chat with friends and play Starcraft at night.

People who travel a lot see ownership of material items in a different context.  That’s why the anecdote in Raymond’s “The simplified office” post is so funny.

I knew a guy once who claimed that you didn’t really
own anything that you couldn’t carry at a dead run
while firing an AK-47 over your shoulder.
This fellow was the only person I ever knew who lived that philosophy.

But you know, I don’t think you need to be in a wartime scenario to benefit from this observation.  Let’s put this another way.

If you only had a backpack’s worth of stuff to take with you…or a trunk, or a car’s worth…what would you take?

Having decided that, look at all the other stuff you own.  Why didn’t you choose those things?  Can you replace some of those things with better things that can make more of a difference in your life?

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell points out in rapid fire succession how too much information causes people to make the wrong decisions.  “Too much information” or “TMI” is a cardinal concept when you design for usability.  It’s hard to make the right decision when you’re presented with a bunch of wrong ones.

Look at search engines, for example.  Excite was one of the first engines on the web. Google came along some time after that.  Visit both pages for a second.  If you wanted to send your mom to one of these pages to search for something, which one would you choose?

Is it any wonder that Google won?

In fact, extra possessions are essentially extra variables in your life.  Extra things that have to be decided upon.  Stuff that you see in a room that causes you to think about totally irrelevant and unhelpful topics.

Does your life look like the Excite page? Or like Google’s?  How much time are you spending looking at possessions that have no bearing on where you want to be in five years?

In “Getting Things Done“, which is another topic of some importance in its own right, David Allen.talks about the concept of open loops.  Open loops are things in your life that haven’t been put in their natural place.  Things that still have to be dealt with.  While I won’t get into the entire justification here, David Allen makes a good case for why having open loops in your life causes stress and uncertainty.

Again, the analogy to possessions comes to mind.  That old computer? What am I going to do with that?  Oh well, not really sure.  Guess I’ll come back to it later.  That old book?  The information might be useful later.  That new gadget?  It would be really great to have.  Not really sure why, but I can think of a few reasons.

How many times will you make that decision in your head, every time you see the object, before you throw it out?  How many times will it pop back into your head, for no reason, before you take a final action that puts that object into its proper place?  How much time will your mind waste breaking flow while you think about such trivial things?  Again, an argument for taking final action on such items.

In the “The Millionaire Next Door“, the authors give repeated evidence of the counterintuitive ways in which millionaires live.  Namely, that millionaires spend money differently.  When we see people with expensive clothes, luxurious surroundings, or new gadgets every week, we are tempted to think that these people are very rich.  In fact, more often than not, the simple fact is that these people live a high consumption lifestyle…they cannot control how they spend their own money.

We naturally think that because someone can afford to spend money on such silly things like a new car every year, they must be very rich.  After all, we ourselves would never spend money like that unless we had a whole lot of it!  True for some people, but there is usually a simpler and more mundane story in play here…these people are actually just not very smart about money.

There are numerous stories in this book about generational effects of money as well.  For example, gifts of money from parent to child actually lower the earning potential of the child below his peers, even with that gift factored in.  Additionally, wealth and earning potential often dissipate from parent to child.  Most millionaires are self made, not old money. 

Amazing, isn’t it?  A well meaning parent cannot help but help his own child, and yet the truth is that he hurts him instead by unnaturally easing the pressure to succeed in the form of a free house and some extra spending money.  What would you do as a parent in a similar situation?

Enough about money…what does this have to do with minimalism?  The high consumption lifestyle is a very clear pattern followed by people who do not reach millionaire status.  I found it enlightening that the presence of money could literally enslave the way in which these people and even their children think.  I made a decision, after reading this particular book, that I would not allow myself to be consumed by money and material possessions as so many people are.

In summary, I hope I’ve made a good case to you as to why the minimalist philosophy works.  By constantly throwing things away, you are forced to remove all the distractions from your life which don’t add value.  In actuality, it’s not the act of removing things from your life that adds value.  Rather, the mental room that you create when you throw things away…that old computer, those ratty clothes, the out of date books and junk mail on your table…can now be filled with more of the things which truly enrich your existence…friends, new experiences, tools to enhance your productivity, and your time contributing to society.  To live minimally is to live a fuller, more purposeful life.

Thank you for reading.