Email has become the primarily method of communication for most people in nearly all organizations. Unfortunately, too many of us have yet to really understand how to work with email yet and the management of email correspondence has become a major source of work in and of itself.
As with most of the meaningful components of our work, there is tension from both ends: if we don’t spend enough time filtering email, we miss deadlines and important information that is now being distributed solely through email. However, if we spend too much time messing with email, we end up with too little time to actually get any of the work we need to get done completed. As Aristotle keenly observed, the balance is in the middle.
Enter the R.A.F.T. method. R.A.F.T. is a handy acronym for Read, Act, File, or Trash. Here’s how it works:
- Read
- Act
- File
- Trash
This one’s self-explanatory. Briefly skim through the email and determine whether it’s something that actually requires your attention. You’d be surprised how much doesn’t. If it doesn’t require your attention, Trash it immediately. If it does, move on.
Does the email require you to do something? If it’s a quick reply, do it, and file the message. If it is something that requires you to do something for the future, but not now, place it on your calendar, or whatever system you use to track suspenses, and file it.
If the message does not require action but needs to be referenced or filed, then File it. I still file messages in one of many different folders, but that’s partially because I manage not only academic stuff but other careers as well. Many productivity gurus are advocating dumping all messages in one big archive and relying on the mature search capabilities now available in most mail apps, but I have yet to make that transition. Do some experimentation to see which is right for you, but, above all, get the stuff out of your inbox.
Be merciless on unactionable, unimportant messages and get rid of them immediately.
The goal here is to get your Inbox either empty or so that it contains messages that require some response of you. I’ve experimented with having @Action, @Response, and @Waiting mail folders and noticed that either I spent too much time shifting through them or that I forgot to check them regularly enough. I transitioned to letting actionable items sit in my Inbox, but to get the psychological release, all the stuff in there had to be stuff that required some sort of prolonged action. Despite it being somewhat of a task parking lot, the goal is still to get it to zero.
Of course, the R.A.F.T. method isn’t anything special, and the elements of it are covered in GTD’s processing system. However, “R.A.F.T.” is a nice little mantra to help you through your Inbox. Here are some other quick tips:
- Don’t check email first thing in the morning
- Turn off the auto-checker in your mail application if you use a computer-based email application.
- Check email twice a day (or as few times as possible).
- (For Mac users) Use Mail Act-On to decrease drag and drop filing time.
- If you get one of those nervous-I-need-an-answer-right-now email messages that would give you peace of mind to answer, quickly respond with “Hey, I’ve got your message and am working on an answer. I will get back to you on X day with the information/answer you’ve requested.”
Doing so starts your day off responding to external projects and actions rather than advancing internal projects. Do your work first and make other people wait their turn.
The threat of a notification alone is enough of a psychological distraction and the reaction is much like waiting for a punch that you know is coming. Again, rather than letting other people’s issues distract you, check email only when you’re ready and prepared to karate-chop your way through it. This also allows you to reference your email without having to deal with the inclination to check and read new messages when you should be completing your more important projects.
Tim’s insight on this is dead-on. I check it about 30 minutes before lunch and about 30 minutes before the end of whatever time I determine I’m done working. Generally, this gives me enough time to respond to short messages, schedule a time to do longer messages and actions, and file messages in their appropriate folder with time left-over.
When a student writes me, I respond or act, and with this nifty program press “~S” (my tag for “this semester’s student email”) and I’m done. Since I have all of my reference folders short-cutted through Mail Act-On, I don’t have to leave my Inbox to get things filed in their assigned folder. This one program alone probably saves me 10-20 minutes a day.
This response is generally sufficient to buy you some time while you work on the other stuff. Complete the tasks and projects you’ve decided you’d work on while you’re at your peak. Figure out the answer to those types of email messages during an allocated time prior to the time you said you’d respond and respond then and only then.
We can either process email effectively so that we can do our work, or we can let email be the work we do.
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This is a great piece. The office I work in uses e-mail for instant communication – versus talking on the phone or in person. E-mail has become almost counter-productive on a day to day basis.
Honestly, I would love to check e-mail only once or twice in a day but as today has proved this would simply not be possible for me. I have to respond to e-mails or other people fall to pieces.
@ Sam: Thanks so much for taking the time to comment! What your reporting is fairly common, and I’ve been thinking more and more about ways to work through the institutional counterproductivity as opposed to the individual counterproductivity. I’ll be working these ideas out the next few days. ‘Making a Habit of Changing Habits’ works on this at the general level, but there’ll be more coming.
Thanks for bringing this topic back to the top.
I look forward to further discussion into this topic as I am currently looking into adding value to my own position and our department as a whole. As the single buyer for our company, I’m often the stop gap for our sales and production force.
As noted by manager, we can get a lot done in the 7:00 hour before we technically open because we are free from interruption or distraction. Factor in the constant e-mails and phone calls and our 8-hour day could easily be spread out over ten works.
Great annotations about email managing.
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