The processing steps and golden rules in action
The ‘back from holiday’ crunch
1. One email at a time – think quickly and use shortcuts
The point of Speedmailing is obviously to be as quick as possible – and sorting should be the speediest part of the process. Your inbox should be a conveyor belt, and you a sorting machine. Don’t look for the special emails – the interesting or important ones. That’s how you lose time, looking over less important emails again and again as you search. Simply process all emails from the top, one at a time. You can address the quick ones on the go. (We’ll talk about the two-minute rule in a moment.) Sort all the others into their rightful action folder so you can attend to them in due time. Once you have finished sorting, you will have all your important emails in one place, and you’ll be ready to start knocking out your to-dos with maximum efficiency.
I find it helps to consider yourself in a different role when you enter your inbox. I use the postman metaphor and visualise putting on a postman hat when starting on my inbox. When I am finished sorting and my inbox is empty, I take it off again and go back to my tasks. A bit weird perhaps, but it works well!
Working this way is not only efficient, but it tackles the most recent emails first – meaning that you can often just ignore older related emails lower in the list. By going through the list in order, you will also get into a flow of decision-making and reduce the time spent on each email. Better yet, when your brain goes into autopilot mode, your decision-making speed improves and you actually consume less energy. The very definition of efficiency!
When you open an email, simply ask yourself, ‘Do I have to act on this email? Is there something I have to do?’ If the answer is yes but the task cannot be done in two minutes, ask yourself if you need to do it today or this week. If it’s a yes again, it goes in ‘Do This Week’. If there’s a specific date you need to act, save the email to your Calendar. Otherwise, you should park it in ‘Holding for Later’. When in doubt, put it in ‘Holding for Later’ and revisit it in your weekly review. (More on that in a moment.)
If the email is not waiting for an action from you, then you have three options: delete, file/archive, or sort into ‘Waiting for Others’. Just delete anything you know is rubbish or you don’t need – note that the keyboard’s Delete key will do this automatically. See Chapter 5 for more shortcuts you can use to speed up the process in Outlook and Gmail.
It should take no more than 10–15 minutes to completely empty your inbox this way. Especially if you embrace using keyboard shortcuts to move emails from your inbox to the required folder. In Outlook this shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+V, followed by typing the first letter of the folder name and then pressing Enter. This sequence seems hard in the beginning, but within days, if not hours, it will become a speedy habit that costs less time and energy than using the mouse.
The second component of the first golden rule is that there is no putting back into your inbox any emails that have been sorted. Once you have decided what to do with an email, it will be banished to one of the action folders. Perhaps it will move between folders, but never back to the inbox. This ensures that your inbox contains only new emails you haven’t yet seen, allowing you to empty it and get focused faster.
2. Follow the two-minute rule
If the answer to the question ‘Do I have to act on this?’ is YES and the task can be done quickly, move on to the second golden rule, the two-minute rule.
As you sort through your inbox, you’ll find many emails that need only a brief answer or question in return or just a quick retrieval of information. Others are simply short newsletters or a to-do that can immediately be forwarded to someone else. Whatever it is, if it will take less than two minutes to do it, take care of it immediately. It’s amazing how many to-dos you can quickly check off your list in this way.