The Boss of You

When I logged on to my com­puter last Mon­day, I had over five hun­dred emails in my inbox. Let me clar­ify: that’s just my work address I’m talk­ing about. I keep sep­a­rate email addresses for per­sonal use and for Boss of You busi­ness, and those had full inboxes, too.

Why the pileup? I had taken two weeks of vaca­tion. That’s all. I had noti­fied my clients I would be away, so very few of those emails were regard­ing active projects. And my spam fil­ters were work­ing just fine. It was sim­ply an accu­mu­la­tion of two weeks’ worth of nor­mal, every­day mail.

It took me sev­eral hours to sort through it all, and I was in triage mode, delet­ing many mes­sages (such as newslet­ters) unread. By the end of the day I was dazed — and appalled by how lit­tle I had got done.

And I came to a bru­tal real­iza­tion: email was killing my pro­duc­tiv­ity. This was not just a one-time fluke; every day I was sub­ject­ing myself to a minia­ture ver­sion of this soul-sucking process of review­ing way more emails than I could rea­son­ably respond to. And it wasn’t just email, either: throw in RSS feeds, Face­book and Twit­ter, and the amount of input I try to process becomes daunt­ing, to say the least.

Coin­ci­den­tally, in the midst of my first-day-back-from-vacation chaos, I came across Beth Kanter’s quiz on infor­ma­tion over­load. I rec­og­nized myself imme­di­ately, and real­ized that what I was deal­ing with was not an email prob­lem, but a prob­lem of how to process increas­ing amounts of input effec­tively and efficiently.

So I am mak­ing some changes. And I want to share them because I believe this issue is a com­mon one among entre­pre­neurs, who by def­i­n­i­tion wear many hats and have busy sched­ules. I’ll try and keep this brief in an effort to reduce your infor­ma­tion over­load, so here’s a quick list of spe­cific actions that have improved my clar­ity of mind:

• Unsub­scribe, unsub­scribe, unsub­scribe (and repeat): I removed myself from dozens of email newslet­ters. I took my inspi­ra­tion from a recent closet purge, where I rid myself of any­thing I hadn’t worn in a year — in this case, if I didn’t either use the infor­ma­tion con­tained within (i.e. act on it) or love the con­tent, I unsub­scribed. This meant say­ing good­bye to some email updates for causes I sup­port, but that sim­ply don’t make it into my list of top pri­or­i­ties, so it wasn’t easy. But it’ll make room for me to read the stuff I do get more care­fully. (Some were eas­ier to say good­bye to, like the newslet­ters pub­lished by stock photo sites. Yawn.)
• Move stuff to per­sonal email: In some cases, I couldn’t bring myself to unsub­scribe, but I knew the email con­tent was not imme­di­ately rel­e­vant to my work life. So I moved some stuff over to my per­sonal email account, where I don’t feel guilty about sift­ing through things more slowly.
• Reduce RSS sub­scrip­tions: Here I was pretty ruth­less, because I have an on-again, off-again rela­tion­ship with my RSS reader — so I often log in to find hun­dreds (or thou­sands) of unread items. I purged the holy hell out of my RSS sub­scrip­tions, includ­ing some (hello, Apart­ment Ther­apy) I love but that sim­ply pub­lish way more stuff than I can actu­ally read.
• Switch non-urgent emails to RSS: Next, I got a lit­tle more fine-grained, and reviewed my remain­ing email sub­scrip­tions to see if any of them would be bet­ter suited to RSS. The key ques­tion for me here is, “Do I want the pub­lisher to push the con­tent to me, or do I pre­fer to go find it when I’m ready?” There were more than a few cases where I felt I’d rather access it when I’m review­ing my RSS head­lines, rather than being dis­rupted by a “new mail mes­sage” alert.
• Con­vert emails in my inbox to actions: I had deleted and unsub­scribed with aban­don, but I still had a crapload of emails to deal with in my inbox. They ranged from time-sensitive client requests to old, old emails I’d held onto to remind me to look into some­thing or other some­day. It was time to review each email and deter­mine exactly what the action was I needed to take. (For those of you on the GTD band­wagon, this’ll be an all-too-familiar con­cept.) Once I got through them all, I had a small inbox and a long (but much more eas­ily parsed) to-do list. My inbox became far less oner­ous, and my to-do list now reflected all the things that had pre­vi­ously been held in the back of my mind.
• Use other tech­nol­ogy to store data: There’s a lot of stuff I had got into the habit of track­ing and stor­ing via email, even though I knew damn well it was not the best medium for it. For exam­ple, I fre­quently sent myself links to things when I didn’t have time to read them right away, or when I wanted to be able to access them from out­side the office. Another exam­ple is event invi­ta­tions — rather than plug­ging the event right into my cal­en­dar I’d hold onto the email. I’m deter­mined to drop this habit. My helper apps are: Omni­Fo­cus (for per­sonal task man­age­ment… I *love* this app so much I want to marry it), Ma.gnolia (for social book­mark­ing), and a cou­ple of awe­some Fire­fox plu­g­ins: Read it Later (which lets you save pages to read later) and Fox­marks (which lets you syn­chro­nize your book­marks on mul­ti­ple com­put­ers). I use my iPhone as my cal­en­dar now (a big step as I was a long-time hold­out with paper cal­en­dars), and I’ve got Omni­Fo­cus for iPhone which is so awe­some it makes my lit­tle head spin with joy — but I don’t count either of those as essen­tial to my productivity.

Once I’d made my way through my work inbox, I took the same approach with my per­sonal email. I use Gmail as my per­sonal email client, and I had been really lazy about archiv­ing emails, so my inbox had a ridicu­lous num­ber of mes­sages in it. Step 1 was to mass-archive sev­eral hun­dred old, read emails that were clut­ter­ing up the scene, and from there the other steps were the same: unsub­scribe, and con­vert emails to actions.

If you can’t find time to do all of the above in one fell swoop, don’t fret; it’s taken me a week to get through them. Try tak­ing one step a day, and see where you get to. In fact, def­i­nitely DON’T try and do this all at once; that would defeat the pur­pose. Your goal here is to reduce over­whelm, not add to it. Do a lit­tle, then sit back and admire your hand­i­work — or bet­ter yet, step away from the com­puter and do some­thing much more fun.

Addi­tional resources:

• Inbox Zero: Action-Based Email (43 Folders)
• Infor­ma­tion Over­load Man­age­ment Tips (Beth Kanter)