Which approach to your email inbox is best?

In late 2021, reporter Matt Doran had the exclusive Australian interview with Adele ahead of the release of her new album.  Unfortunately, after he’d flown all the way to London, the interview was terminated when Adele found out he hadn’t listened to the preview!  Doran  missed the crucial email with the link in his inbox and made headlines for all the wrong reasons as a result.

For many of us it can feel like our lives are run by messaging apps from email through to social media.  We live in fear of making Doran’s mistake and missing something important.

In the absence of rules and structure, the most common approach to managing email is chaotic and archaeological.  People deal with email based on what they perceive to be most important after a cursory glance and are more likely to respond to recent messages (like the top layers of an archaeological dig).

This approach accepts that many messages slip down a large inbox (which gets parsed and archived occasionally) but assumes that important threads get lifted to prominence in the inbox as others reply.

As much as this chaotic approach sounds bad, apart from the odd missed Adele album preview email, it seems to find most of the most important material surprisingly efficiently (see Serendipity).  In the era of paper-bound offices, the term “volcano” was sometimes applied to the desks of people with an out-of-control pile of work in front of them which accumulated in the middle and spread-out across the available space and yet were amazingly successful at finding material when they needed to.

An often talked about alternative is “Inbox Zero” which was made popular by Merlin Mann.  The approach focuses on responding or forwarding emails as quickly as possible to get them out of the inbox.  Even those that require more consideration are still moved to a folder which encourages rapid action.

While it would be nice to finish the day with no unopened email waiting in my inbox, is this most efficient approach?  As I’ve written before, the problem isn’t that email degrades productivity, but rather it works too well.

Although it can feel productive to have a clear inbox, the overall organisational impact may not be as good as it seems as we effectively treat other people’s email as a commodity.  One person earns peace of mind at the expense of a small amount additional stress for numerous others.  Worse, in our world of short attention spans, many tasks would be well served by a few well thought through exchanges rather than a multitude of hurriedly written messages.

Email was created based on the analogy of paper memos.  Those memos went through an internal or external postal system (“snail mail”) that caused a natural lag in the communication.  People typically looked at their incoming mail in the morning when they came to work.  If there was a backlog, they took it home in their briefcase to read and reply – but the posting was done the next day.  Urgent issues were always dealt with by phone or in-person.

Over decades of working with email, I’ve developed a pattern of inbox management.  It is based on the principle of first-in-first-out (FIFO) where I scan my email for genuinely urgent issues but otherwise work sequentially from oldest to newest.  Ideally, I completely clear out anything older than 24 or 36 hours so I can work in bursts and avoid hasty or reactive messages.

If you receive 100 emails per day, it is likely that 75 of them are simply for reading and deleting (or filing), even this will still likely take half a minute each.  It may be that five are genuinely urgent and require immediate intervention.  The remaining 20 will require a response, taking perhaps one minute to write quickly or three minutes to do properly.  When the goal is Inbox Zero or to get to the message before it is buried by archaeological chaos, it is very tempting to do the former.  However, each time that the quick response route is taken, it is likely to bounce around a small group five or more times, consuming another minute each cycle for a total of at least five minutes.

Worse, the combined total of the effort across everyone in the thread is almost always much greater for a poorer outcome.  The problem that could perhaps have been definitively solved in less than five minutes requires an aggregate effort that is closer to half an hour spread over a larger group.

Consistently using the FIFO method, and only dealing with genuinely urgent issues out of sequence, means that people come to anticipate each message being actioned with a considered response.  They adjust to providing all their input in one comprehensive email as they realise that hurried input requiring follow-up will take two or more cycles to get through the FIFO inbox.  At its best, this approach skips to the end of the thread and properly closes-out issues.

The sense of certainty of the FIFO method reduces the unease of a chaotic inbox for everyone.  There is no point dealing with the angst of chaos by degrading the productivity of colleagues but nor do we want to always live just one Adele email away from disaster!