Section 4: Handling email on your mobile device vs. dealing with it on your computer. Now it's a little bit of a double-edged sword that we can access email from our smartphones, from other mobile devices, but just because we can doesn't mean we should. Sometimes we get into something on our phones and then we realize, this would have been 10 times faster to handle when I had a real keyboard. If I was sitting at the computer, I could look up the information I need. I should not have tried to handle this on my phone. It's a trap that we get into all the time. So in this section, I want to give you some guidelines on what to do on your phone vs. what to do save for a real computer with a keyboard and all the other tools that you have available to you on your computer.

Now, first of all, we need to be careful that when we're using a mobile device for email that we're not ruining some of the benefits of emails asynchronous design. Email was designed to be an inbox, not a stream. It was not designed to be an instant messenger or a text messaging kind of thing where people could just ping you at any time. It was designed to be asynchronous so you could allow messages to pile up and then you deal with them when you were ready to deal with them. And because it's possible now for you to get instant notification for every single email that comes in, those notifications might even make a sound or it might make your phone ding or buzz and that can be very distracting. In some organizations, it has even become standard for people to expect an instantaneous response to an email. And I want to suggest that you will be much less stressed out by email if you create a culture where that is not what people do. If people need to interrupt you, they reach you some other way and they stop expecting and instantaneous response to their emails. So one of the first things you can do to reduce the stress that comes from those emails hitting your mobile device constantly in simply turn off notifications.

Now you might leave on the on-screen notifications, personally, I do. I have my iPhone set to show me a notification when I get an email. But I turned off the sound that can accompany those emails. If you go into your device settings and find the app setting for email, turn off sounds. And that has the effect of turning off the vibration or buzz when you get an email. Of course, you can make your own decision about this, but chances are good you do not really need the audio or the vibration alert every single time you get an email. It's counterproductive. It's distracting and it's stressful. Don't worry about forgetting to check email. You are going to check email and you do not need to see those messages instantaneously. So what are we going to use our mobile devices for if we're not going to constantly check email on them?

One thing we can do is we can take advantage of those times when we're standing in line, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a meeting to start and we have a few minutes. It can be a great opportunity to triage messages that really don't require anything of you. If you are going to send a big long reply, don't worry about that message yet, but you can get through the messages that are just advertisements, FYIs, people sending you things that you really need to see. Just swipe to archive it. In the Gmail app in particular, you can set the swipe actions to mark things as unread or to archive them, get them out of your inbox. This is how I have mine set up, right swipe marks it as unread and left swipe archives it and I never have to think about it again. But I also never have to worry about it, because it's not deleted. It's there if I need it. I can very quickly find it. But if I have made the decision that I don't need to see it again, it is out of my inbox. One other thing you may want to do from your mobile device is unsubscribe.  This is a great use of time, it's a little bit of a pain, but it's a wonderful investment because every company that emails you is going to email you again and again and again.

Just today, I unsubscribed from a Starbucks mailing list. They are always emailing me about my points. I never go to Starbucks just because I want to take advantage of some promotion. It depends on where I am. So there's no reason for me to ever get this email again. So I hit unsubscribe. And in a lot of apps—it depends on the app that you are using and the service you are using—sometimes there is even a button at the top—if you click the three dots you might see and unsubscribe option. You don't even have to scroll down to the bottom of the message if its a mailing list, often that is an option. Down at the bottom—if your app doesn't have a real quick unsubscribe button—down at the bottom you will find an unsubscribe link. Those are required. There is required to be an unsubscribe mechanism. Almost always, if it's a big company that is fully automated, you won't have to complain to anybody. Just click the link and you are off the list. It is easy to not worry about that. It is easy to just ignore the email, let it come in, let more messages come in, and just never take action to unsubscribe. But if you are on thousands and thousands of mailing lists, then this is a problem that just gets worse and worse over time.

So I want to encourage you to use that time when you are on your mobile device to actually unsubscribe and get off of mailing lists that you don't need to be on.  Now you can also unsubscribe from humans and you can do this very briefly from your mobile device, you can hit reply and say please remove me or please do not contact me again. I want you to understand that it is standard now for vendors and salespeople to use a multichannel, multistep campaign—what they call a high-touch campaign—to contact you. If you are a high-value prospect, if you are a decision-maker who controls an organizational budget, it is very common for them to have a multichannel campaign where they are contacting you on LinkedIn, they are sending you emails, sending things in the mail, they are calling you, they are giving you robocalls, they are sending you instant messages on other platforms. And there are whole systems that are taught and they are software designed to make this efficient for the salespeople. So don't be afraid to say to those salespeople who are constantly pinging you and trying to get your attention and trying to get you to set up calls with them—don't be afraid to just say, I'm not interested, please do not contact me again. I have to do that all the time. You probably do also, and you are not being rude by doing so. Just give yourself a little text shortcut or save a snippet of text that says, please remove me from your list or stop contacting me. You are going to have to do that. You've got to be able to unsubscribe from humans and you can. They will stop contacting you if you ask.

So what else can we do on mobile devices? What should we save for the desktop? When it comes to those more complicated emails that are going to require a longer response, I don't like to answer those on mobile. But I do like to have the opportunity to think about them. And sometimes when I think about a difficult email, I realize, you know what? This really needs to be a phone call. I don't need to get back to this person on my computer. I need to actually pick up the phone and talk to them or go see them and have a face-to-face conversation. Most of the time, it simply is not going to be the best use of time to send a long reply from my mobile device. So save it for your computer, save it for face to face conversation, or just pick up the phone—you're on your phone anyway so why not?

While we're talking about mobile devices, I want to say a word about text messages, because text messages in my view have just gotten completely out of control over the past few years. People are constantly texting  about non-urgent things. They really see everyone else in the universe as instantly accessible to them for any reason whatsoever. And it can be hugely distracting. Now depending on the circles that you are in and the way that people around you use technology, it may also be a messaging app. If there is a group messaging app that people use all the time, you may want to just turn off notifications for that. And really set the expectation that if people need something from you, they can email you. And if they need to interrupt you, they can call you. But I think text messaging really has almost no place in a professional setting. I think it's really unprofessional, it's really unproductive, it's really inefficient.

So we really want as few people as possible to have access to us by text message. And when they are texting us, of course, it's useful to be able to get a quick question answered, but we don't want people to be giving us work to do. We don't want people to be making requests from us that we need to follow up with later, because texting is a stream communication format. There's no marking things unread, there's no forwarding a text message. There's no putting something on your calendar from a text message, it's just not designed the way email is to be that kind of inbox based tool. So if people are texting you, get them to stop. Train them to stop. Ask them to email you and then follow up on those emails and you will have far fewer interruptions from your mobile device.