Managing Email and All The Other Forms of Communication.

This week’s question is all about managing your communications and ensuring you have enough time to deal with it every day.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 273 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 273 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Last week, I talked about how by turning everything into a project was a sure fire way to become overwhelmed and overstretched. Instead, I suggested you look for the processes for doing your work.  If you write articles, create marketing campaigns, deal with clients on a frequent basis, then these are not projects. They are just a part of a process for doing your work.  However, there are some parts of our work that are difficult to develop processes for and one of those is handling all the communications you get each day.  Prior to 2000—before the current digital age, most communications largely came from mail, telephone or fax. That meant things were relatively easy to manage—there were only three channels of communication and each one gave us a logical timeline for a response. A letter could be responded to within a week or two, a telephone call was instant—if we were near a phone—and a fax could be sat on for a couple of days. There was not sense we had to respond immediately. Today, thing are quite different. Almost all the messages we receive today could be responded to immediately.  I remember reading the book: The Man With The Golden Typewriter, a book of letters written by Ian Fleming, and awed by the number of letters beginning with the words: “Please accept my apologies for the delay in my reply. I have just returned from an eight week sabbatical in Jamaica”.  That’s two months to reply and nobody would have been angry. It was just the way life was back then. Not necessarily slower, just there were conventions in place and acceptable reasons for not responding in a timely manner.  Back to today, how do we manage our communications so they do not become overwhelming and out of control. Well, before we get to that answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks: Hi Carl, I was hoping you have some advice for organising all the messages and emails I get each day. My company uses Microsoft Teams and it’s always alerting me to new messages. And Emails are a joke. It takes me all afternoon just to stay on top of these. Do you have any ideas for handling these? Hi Annie, thank you for sending in your question.  It’s a timely question too as I covered communications last week in my productivity workshop and there were a lot of questions about getting on top of these.  Let’s deal with email first as this is the easiest to manage. With email we can create a simple process that if followed each day, will get you on top of it and keep you on top of it.  There are two parts to managing email: processing and doing. The key is not to mix the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as you can. This means when you open your inbox, the goal is to get to zero. This means you do not want to be stopping to reply to those emails you think will take two minutes or less (they rarely take two minutes—more like five or six minutes)  Any actionable email get sent to an Action This Day folder and everything else is either deleted or archived. Now that’s a quick summary, but the essence is get that inbox cleared.  The