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Let’s talk now about how to get your email under control, because if there’s one source of distraction and overwhelm that keeps more administrators out of classrooms than anything else, it’s email.
Email is really just a communication tool, but for many people, their inbox has grown out of control, and is a tremendous source of stress. It doesn’t have to be that way, and in this section, I’m going to share an approach that’ll allow you to get your inbox completely empty every day.
As you’ll see, this isn’t at all about being fastidious. It’s about being current, so you know what’s on your plate, and you can prioritize effectively. That way, you can get into classrooms with confidence and without distraction.
The core concept here is to use email as a communication tool, and JUST a communication tool, and stop using it for purposes that aren’t a good fit. Not all communication should happen over email. If you find yourself writing a 2,000 word email…well, that probably should have been a phone call or a face-to-face meeting.
I love email because it’s easy and efficient, if we use it the right way. But that requires that we set some boundaries to keep it from getting out of control. One rule of thumb is to never write an email that’s more than 5 sentences long. If you need to say more, pick up the phone, or go talk in person. This is especially true for sensitive issues that may be subject to public records requests, or may lead to miscommunications or misunderstandings.
So email is a communication tool, but it’s not our only option, and we shouldn’t rely on it when a phone call or a face-to-face conversation would be more appropriate.
But if we look at why email is such a big problem for so many leaders, it’s not just the communication function. It’s also that we use email for many other purposes that aren’t a good fit for the way email was designed. For example, right now, you probably have dozens of emails waiting in your inbox that represent work that you need to do. Just like paper clutter on your desk, those emails are there to remind you of tasks that you need to complete, or issues that you need to follow up on.
So essentially, email serves as a to-do list or task manager for a lot of leaders, but it’s not a very good one. Think about how you’d organize your tasks if you were making a to-do list for the day, or planning a complex project. Would you organize your tasks by the date they occurred to you, or by the name of the person who sent them to you? Of course not – you’d arrange them in some logical order that makes sense to you, like priority, or the project they’re related to, or the due date, or the order they need to be done in. But email doesn’t lend itself to that kind of organization. It sorts itself by date or sender, so it stacks up, just like paper.
So we need to give ourselves better ways to organize the work that’s in our email inboxes, and in an earlier section of this module, we talked about organizing the work you’re not doing yet with backlogs, so you have a place for everything and everything in its place, and I recommended some electronic apps that you might want to try for organizing that work.
When you have a good electronic task management system in place, you can stop using email as a to-do list – because again, it’s not a very good one – and you can start using email effectively for communication.
Now, think about what makes communication tools work – tools like text messaging and postal mail. I’m going to guess that you actually read your text messages, and I’m going to guess that when you check your postal mailbox every day, you take everything out of it, and look through it, and don’t put anything back in it.
Because you get current on your text messages and mailbox every day, they work as communication tools. And if you do the same with email, it’ll start to work better as a communication tool, too.
So I want to suggest a practice that may sound radical, but that has served me well for years: get your email inbox empty every single day, and by empty, yes, I mean zero messages left in your inbox.
Just as it’s incredibly reassuring to have a clear desk, it feels great to have an empty inbox, at least once a day, so you know there are no surprises waiting for you. It’s the fear of those surprises that makes it psychologically difficult to step away from the office and get into classrooms, so I want to encourage you to make a habit of clearing out your inbox every day.
And just like clearing off your desk, there are some simple steps you can take to make huge progress right away. The first thing you can do is archive old messages.
Anything you’re done with that doesn’t need to be in your inbox can be archived. Just hit the Archive button if you’re using Gmail or G Suite for Education, and if you’re using a different email system, just make a folder, name it Archive, and move all of your old messages out of your inbox and into that Archive folder.
What you don’t need to do is create a bunch of folders and organize your emails one by one. That takes forever, and it’s really hard to keep up with. As we saw with paper, it’s a lot more efficient to just throw everything into a box that we call the Chronological File, and if you need to go searching in that box, you can. And with email, it’s even easier, because you can do a keyword search of your archived messages, so there’s really no reason to leave things in your inbox or file them in specific folders. Just archive your old messages, and get them out of your inbox, so that it’s truly an inbox, just for new messages, because again, email is a communication tool.
Now, one of the reasons emails tend to pile up is that just like with paper, often we get emails that we can’t fully take care of in one day, so we need a way to postpone them to make sure we follow up at the appropriate time. But we don’t want to just leave those emails sitting around in the meantime, because the clutter becomes a problem very quickly. So with paper, I showed you a system called the Future File that allows you to snooze a hardcopy document to any specific day in the future. If you haven’t set that up yet, make sure you do, because it really does make a difference.
And we can do the same thing for email.
Unfortunately, there’s no snoozing feature built into a lot of email apps, but that’s starting to change. Some mobile apps have snooze buttons, and Gmail has a snooze button built in. If you don’t currently have the ability to snooze emails in your system, I’ve listed a few services on the page below, including the one I personally use to snooze my emails. These third-party systems work based on forwarding, so they’re compatible with any email service and device. If you want an email out of your inbox, but you want to see it again on, say, Friday, you can simply forward it to a special address like Friday – at – whatever the service is – dot com.
And on Friday, the service will forward it back to you, and you can take action on it.
So now, you have everything you need to have an empty inbox every day. First, you have an electronic task management app, so you’re not relying on email to be your to-do list. Second, you have an archive folder, just like that Chronological File box under your desk, so old emails can get out of your way. Third, you have a snoozing tool, so if you need to handle certain emails in the future, they can be out of your way in the meantime.
Getting your inbox empty every day allows you to get current, so you can use email for its intended communication purposes, and have the peace of mind to get out of the office and into classrooms.
Congratulations on reaching the end of Module 1 of the Instructional Leadership Challenge. Now that you know how to Get Current, you’re ready to Get Into Classrooms. I’m Justin Baeder, and I’ll see you in Module 2. [/thrive_toggles][/thrive_toggles_group]
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