Let's talk now about some of the inherent design features and properties of email because if we understand how email was designed to work and how it actually does work we can make sure that we're using it for the right purposes and in the right ways so that it doesn't become overwhelming to us. The first thing we've got to understand is that email is fundamentally a tool for communication. It is not a to-do list. It is not a day timer. It is not a planner. It is simply a tool for communication. 

And most of the problems that we run into with email come from using it for purposes other than the purpose that it was designed for. And if we use it for communication it works very well. Now one of the things that's happened over the last couple of decades, you know gradually, and now it might feel like this happens completely with our work, is that so much of our work arrives via email. Yet it would be a mistake to simply characterize your work as email. "What's your job? What do you do all day?" " Well, I answer email." Well probably not, right? Unless you're in a role where literally all you do every day is email people back, the email probably carries other work that you need to do and then email is really just the communication medium for that. 

And with that realization in mind we can start to distinguish between two things that might seem the same but that are not— processing email and actually doing the work involved in fully resolving those emails. If somebody sends you a task that needs to be done if they make a request of you, answering the email could be very quick, right? You can get back to somebody in a few seconds and say sure I'll do that, but actually doing the work might take much more time. And we need to be careful not to blame email for the amount of time that that actual task takes up. And, of course, a lot of that work doesn't need to be done while we're checking email. It can be done at another time and we can stay focused on getting through email if that's what we're doing at that particular moment. 

So email does not have to be out of control even if you have a lot of work. You don't have to be overwhelmed by email if you have a good process for staying caught up with it. And that's what you'll learn here in the inbox overhaul. It's important to understand that as email is designed to be a communication tool, it's not designed to be a to-do list, a strategic plan, a dashboard of priorities, an agenda for the day. And yet if we allow it to, email can take over your day. If you sit down in the morning and say, "all right, I need to get caught up on email." 

It is not difficult to spend all day doing nothing but reading and responding to and doing work that has arrived via email, if we allow that to happen. But that only happens if we don't have an effective process for processing email—for triaging it—for dealing with it—so that we can get on to all the other work that we need to do as leaders. The thing we need to remember is that email is just a communication tool. And it's not even just a mediocre communication tool—I think email is an excellent communication tool. And the fact that it's stood the test of time and been in use for more than 40 years is a testament to just how useful a tool it is. Compare email. if you will, to a tool like a two-way radio. If you had a two-way radio and that was how you communicated with other people, what would be some of the drawbacks of using that two-way radio to communicate about your work? 

Well for one thing a two-way radio is a kind of proprietary device, right? Only other people who have that same type of radio could communicate with you and when they do they have to interrupt you. There's no voicemail with a two-way radio they've got to get you right now they can't leave a message, you know, they have to really interrupt what you're doing right now. They can't necessarily reach you if they're in a different time zone or a different location they have to be physically close enough to reach you. 

So compared to either a face-to-face conversation or a two-way radio, email is fabulous because it was designed to be asynchronous. It was designed to not necessarily interrupt you but to wait for you to check it. It was designed to be flexible so you could  send file attachments and all sorts of messages and not just with people who were within a closed system. You don't have to have the same email service as someone else; it's universal. You can communicate with people in other organizations all around the world and those messages will simply sit there and wait for you to check them—to process them—to deal with them—and that is a tremendous gift to leaders who are trying to get work done without being interrupted.

 But too often we allow ourselves to be interrupted. We say, "well I'm getting emails. I can see them on my phone. So I'm just going to have to stop what I'm doing and check those emails." But that is not true. That is a choice that we have control over. And I think what we have to do is really be disciplined in the choices we make about what to use email for. It's kind of like using a butter knife as a screwdriver, right? You can use a butter knife as a screwdriver, but it's not going to work especially well. You can use your email inbox as a to-do list, but it's not going to work especially well. You can use it to store files, you can use it in place of conversations that really should be face-to-face or phone calls. If you want to email back and forth at length with it with someone, sometimes we realize after the fact you know what we should have just picked up the phone and I could have saved an hour of typing. 

We can, if we want to, use email as an instant messenger where we're constantly replying and typing out messages with our thumbs on our phones, but it was not designed for any of those purposes. It was designed to be an asynchronous communication tool and it works best when we use it that way. It was also designed to be an inbox based rather than a stream based communication medium. Now what do I mean by that? If you look at how your inbox is designed, it will collect emails even when you're not looking at it. Like, nothing bad happens if you sign out of your email, turn off your device, and check it again tomorrow. All of those emails will still be there. Nothing bad happens when those emails pile up. Now it can be stressful when those emails pile up, if you realize that they have piled up on top of other emails that you haven't dealt with. But because they're all safely there waiting for you in your inbox, it's very easy to get caught up get current on what's there without being interrupted.

 And given that you probably have other work to do other than email, it's essential that you be able to shut off those noisy streams that otherwise are pinging you all day long with notifications. You probably get notifications from social media, from text messages, from email—all kinds of notifications are coming in and we've got to be able to shut those off if we really want to get work done. So email works as an inbox style communication medium and does not have to interrupt you. It is not like the two-way radio. You can ignore it and all of the messages will still be waiting for you and that is essential for protecting yourself from the asymmetry that you face as a leader. 

All of those streams where people are pinging you and you're getting push notifications—you've got to be able to turn that off and focus or else you're going to be constantly overwhelmed. You're going to realize, I've been staring at my phone all day when I could have had the phone turned off and put the phone down. I could have gotten some serious work done if I had only shut off those streams and allowed my inboxes to do their job. So how can we minimize stream based communication well? 

First of all, I think we have to be very selective about who if anyone can contact us with an interrupting form of communication, right? You probably will answer the phone if it's an immediate family member or somebody that you work with very very closely. There's probably a short list of people who you trust to interrupt you if they need to because you know that they're going to respect your time and they're going to use good judgment about whether they interrupt you. But if other people are interrupting you, we get annoyed, right? We get annoyed when we get sales calls. We get annoyed when people text us about things they could have emailed us about, and so on. And I want to recommend that any time you realize that people are interrupting you when they don't need to—ask them to send you an email. 

And this is a little bit of a generational challenge I think with younger and younger generations, there is a greater tendency to text about everything and there is a real asymmetry that comes in for leaders when it comes to texting. You might have 20 or 30 people who expect to be able to text you and get an immediate response and frankly that's not fair. It's not fair to you because you can't keep up with all of that and still get other work done. And it's not fair to them because they don't have any clarity in terms of their expectation about when you're going to get back to them.

 So I think we've got to dramatically shift the expectation that we don't text unless there is something that is truly urgent and really does need an immediate response. Everything else goes to email. Now along with that though, if we want people to email us and allow their messages to sit and wait in our inbox, we have to do our part and actually get back to people. People are going to learn very quickly if we say, "Hey just email me." If we never get back to people on email they're gonna learn, "okay, I'll say I'm going to email you, but I'm really going to text you. I'm really going to come and knock on your door so that my issue gets dealt with." We train other people to interrupt us or not by our behavior. So you've got to handle your inboxes well if you want people to use them. We've got to build the expectation and the trust in order to allow inboxes to do their job and prevent those interruptions.