One of the key features of being a leader when it comes to dealing with email is simply the asymmetry that you face. One of the key challenges is that there are so many different people who can send you so many different kinds of emails and there is only one of you to deal with it all. 

Now The Asymmetry Problem takes a number of different forms. You have multiple different stakeholder groups, and if you are in a leadership position, by definition, there are more people than there are of you. It's not just one person that's emailing you—it's lots of different people in lots of different roles. And in fact, even people you don't know, that you'll never meet, salespeople, vendors, companies, can email you and you have got to figure out how to deal with that. And there is also an asymmetry when it comes to the work itself.

 If someone else makes a request of you, it may only take them a few seconds to make that request to ask you for something. Maybe they'll ask you to fill out something or write them a letter of recommendation, something like that that you might be called upon frequently to do as a leader. And that maybe hours of work for you, even though writing the original email on the other person's part only took a few seconds. So we have these massive asymmetries that result in leaders—people in any kind of leadership position, getting tons and tons of email and really struggling to keep up. 

So in this first section, we're going to talk about how to level the playing field so that, as a leader, you are not facing such a stark asymmetry and being at the whim of so many other people who send you email. One of the first things we can do to level the playing field is to work with our various stakeholders—people who are emailing us that we have some sort of obligation in return to get back to them, to handle their issue, to be responsive and supportive and to not simply take full responsibility and make ourselves feel guilty until we're done dealing with their issue. But we can take some steps to level the playing field. We can start by just briefly acknowledging it and there is a symmetry there if all we need to do is acknowledge the email. We can reply with something quick like, "Thank you for sharing this with me, I'll get back to you." 

We can also route that request to an existing forum. If we have an upcoming committee meeting where we’d discuss issues like that, we don't necessarily have to stop and take time out of our day as leaders right in that moment to deal with that issue if it can be handled in existing forums. So that can be an option. And we can also ask other people to follow-up with us. Just say, "Hey, I might be able to get back to you this week, do me a favor though—check back with me on Friday and we'll see where it stands and I can get back to you then. But please check back with me." So we can ask the other person to be proactive if they want their request to be handled. 

So with stakeholders, obviously we have a greater obligation to be responsive and to negotiate what we are going to do and how we are going to spend our time to support the people that we are accountable to. We also have people that we are not accountable to who email us. And if you are in any kind of leadership role in an organization—if you are a school principal, if you are an executive—then you probably are in the crosshairs of many marketers and salespeople. And commercial email lists are a big business. I get contacted all the time by people who want to sell email lists of people who would be hot prospects. It is lucrative, and believe it or not, it is legal for companies that you have never contacted and never done business with to email you out of the blue without permission. And I'm going to guess that if you are in a leadership role, if your contact information is public, then this happens all the time. I'm going to guess that if you are a school principal, you are probably on 1000 or more mailing lists, which email you with different frequencies—maybe it's only once a month or a couple times a year. Maybe it's every week or even every day, and they will not stop unless you tell them to. But the good news is, if you tell them to stop emailing you, that have to and they will. By and large, they will stop if you tell them to stop. You can simply click unsubscribe. You can reply to the email and say, "Please remove me from your list." And that works no matter how they are emailing you. So we'll talk more about unsubscribing later on in the Inbox Overhaul. But just know you can fight back—if people are emailing you out of the blue, without your permission—you can tell them to stop. 

The third strategy that we can use to level the playing field is by asking for an increased commitment from the other person. In other words, you can ask them to put some skin in the game if they are going to ask you to do some work via email. For example, if someone wants to take up your time with a phone call or a meeting, you could say, "Hey, send me a draft agenda with some idea of what you'd like to talk about in that meeting." Or if you'd like me to write a recommendation letter, "Could you write up a few key points that you'd like me to speak to and then I'll have something to start with." And that's a very great way to make sure that something is not a huge amount of time for you and a small amount of time for the other person. If you are being asked to intervene in a conflict, get involved in a situation that you are pretty sure the other people can handle on their own, you can say “I’m happy to help, but I don’t want to escalate the situation by becoming involved if you can work it out together. Why don’t you talk to her directly first, and let me know how it turns out?” If people need paperwork filled out, maybe they can fill out most of the paperwork for you, that kind of thing. 

If it would be a very difficult issue to address via email—maybe it would take you an hour to write back a lengthy and detailed and respectful response—maybe that just needs to be an in-person meeting or a phone call. So you can ask people to make an appointment. Sometimes you can put the ball in their court and say, "Hey, thanks for bringing this to my attention. What do you think we should do?" Or if the ball is already in someone else's court, you can simply say, "Hey, thanks for letting me know. Thanks for the heads up—let me know how it turns out." We don't always have to take responsibility for other people's issues simply because they bring them to us. 

There is an old management parable about the employee who comes into the managers' office with a monkey on his back and says, "Hey boss, I've got this monkey, what are you going to do about it?" And as the leader, as the boss in that situation, one of your key ways of protecting your time is to make sure that everybody who brings you a monkey leaves your office with their monkey. We do not want anybody to leave their monkeys with us. So we want to ask for skin in the game, and we want to encourage people to take ownership and not just dump their issues on us via email—or else our inboxes will get out of control. 

Now over time, we can develop some habits around handling those asymmetries and asking other people to put some skin in the game. So one of the things you can do is you can save your replies, your responses, the text you use to get back to someone—and ask them to take some action to solve their issue and not leave the whole thing with you. You can save that either in an app, like Text Expander—I personally have used Text Expander for probably more than a decade. I love Text Expander because it allows you to type in abbreviations and give a respectful and detailed response without a lot of typing. You can also do this in specific apps like Gmail—there is a feature called templates in Gmail that you can use to write rewritten responses that you can very quickly respond with. But I personally like Text Exander and I would put things like this in my Text Expander. For example, an all-purpose reply that you can use quite often is, "Thanks for letting me know. I'll look into this and get back to you." And then, you can see in brackets here I've got an abbreviation. 

I like to start all of my Text Expander abbreviations with a comma, because a comma, in normal typing, always has a space after it. So any time I type a comma and then anything else, it's going to be a shortcut in Text Expander. I've got ,look for that first one. Maybe you need a quick reply for acknowledging something, "Got it. Thanks!" ,got. Maybe you have a more detailed response to a specific issue that people ask you about all the time. Maybe you, like I was, maybe you're an elementary school principal and you are constantly getting emails from parents saying, "Hey, I would really like to request that my child be in this certain teacher's class." Well maybe you have a page long policy and explanation about that and you can save that as a custom response. "Hey, thanks for reaching out. We're committed to making sure that every student is in a class where blah blah blah." You know, you don't want to have to write that email 1000 times even though you may get asked that question 1000 times. 

So write it once, save it, and reuse it. And that's a great way to fight that asymmetry of a very quick question needing a very lengthy and detailed reply. Another way you can use those saved responses is to delegate. You can pass something on to Karen, for example, someone on your team. "Karen, could you follow up and with this person?" Boom we've got an abbreviation for Karen. So those are some ways to fight the asymmetry that you face as a leader. It is not necessarily a fair fight when we have all of these people emailing us about all of these different things and there is only one of us to respond. But you can use these strategies to level the playing field a little bit.