Section 6: The Right Tools. Being productive with email is all about using email for what it was designed for and allowing other tools to do their job and not trying to use email to do everything. There's the old saying, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We want to be ready to use the appropriate tools. We don't want to use email for things it wasn't designed for. So here are some other tools you'll need for optimum productivity with email to manage your time. You don't want to be looking at your inbox every day and try to mentally construct your schedule. You want to have an actual calendar, whether that's on paper or electronic. I personally keep both. I keep long-term appointments in my Google calendar and I keep a daily agenda in a paper planner so that I can think through my day as I write out my schedule. Similarly with your to-do list. You might keep a paper to-do list for the day. You might have an electronic to-do list that you use to organize your tasks and projects more long-term. Definitely helpful to have a place other than email to keep track of your tasks.

As we mentioned in section 5, you want to have a timeshifting service for your email like followupthen.com. Most people don't know about timeshifting emails. They don't have a service like that so that probably is one of the biggest gaps in your portfolio of tool for handling email. So definitely check out followupthen.com. And of course, you don't want to keep things in your inbox just so you have easy access to file attachments, so you want to have another way of keeping track of your files—whether that's Google Docs or Google Drive or Evernote or Dropbox. Whatever it is that you use. Make sure that you have a good system in place so that you are not relying on email to just hold files long term. Let's talk first about an electronic or paper to-do list.

Again, email is not great as a to-do list because the messages are not sorted by priority or project or anything like that. They are sorted by who they came from and when they arrived and that's not optimal for keeping track of your tasks. If it is less than 2 minutes, of course, you can just handle it right in your inbox. But if it's going to be more time consuming, you might want to put it in your to-do app or on your calendar. And then timeshift the email. You know, if you are going to work on this on Tuesday, forward it to Tuesday@followupthen.com and then archive the original email. There are lots of productivity task management and project management tools out there. Things like ToDoist, I think Todoist is a very nice one. Ther are tools that are built into what you are probably using already for email, like in Mircosoft Outlook or in Gsuite, you've got Google Keep, Google Tasks, there is probably a task feature on your phone. You could use a paper planner. I personally would recommend ToDoist if you are looking for something because it allows you to send emails to it and turn them into tasks, but that is a bit outside of the scope of what we are going to cover in the Inbox Overhaul. And if you have more complex needs, if you are coordinating with other people you might need a tool like Asana, which is what I personally use. Your calendar, of course, should easily be able to make appointments from an email. You should be able to click on the email and very quickly make an appointment or if you can't do that with just a few clicks, you can do that manually. Just make an appointment on your calendar to work on a particular issue and that way you'll ensure that you'll have time blocked off during the day to do that work. And then you want to snooze that email—you'll want to forward that email to your timeshifting service so that it arrives back in your inbox when you are planning to work on it. And then you can reply or you have the reference information that you need. And you want to make sure that you have that in front of you but you want it to just sit in your inbox until then.

One thing to watch out for with your calendar—make sure that on your mobile device, you aren't adding something to a built-in calendar that was there by default that doesn't synchronize with your other devices. So it's very common on iPhones for the iPhone to have its own built-in, but hat might not be the one that you use in your organization. So make sure you turn off or delete any extra calendars that you are not using on your mobile device.  Let's talk about file storage. Again, there are lots of considerations we could talk about here that fall outside the scope of the Inbox Overhaul. Things like Dropbox, Evernote—there are lots of good options out there. Probably some that are preferred by your organization—but generally I would recommend not using email for file storage. If there are random things that you might want to hold on to and you don't want to put a lot of effort into saving them to a folder—personally I do pay for extra storage in my Gmail account. I have 100 gigabytes at the moment. So there are plenty of things that I never download from my email. I archive the message and then I can search for it and it lives happily there in my email account. So lots of options. But have a good system so that you are not keeping things in your inbox perpetually just for access to frequently used files. Now let's talk about the ultimate collaboration tool—it is not software, it is not a device, it is not an app. It is good old face-to-face conversation. It is easy to forget that anytime we are messaging someone else with a device, whether that's a text message or an email or a voicemail, that ultimately all of those are just twists on a good old-fashioned conversation. And so much business and work gets done—so many professional relationships happen through those face-to-face conversations. We have to be careful not to lose that in a desire to be efficient or in a desire to use technology. So don't overlook the possibility of just good old-fashioned conversation. If that conversation can happen in person, great! If not, second-best is picking up the phone. Now it's easier than ever to pick up the phone, because you probably have your phone with you at all times. Your email is already on your phone. So if you decide, you know what, I don't actually want to answer this email. I want to call this person and talk to them. By all means, do it.

Use email for what it's good for, and use better tools including conversation whenever it is possible. And I want to leave you with a couple of final thoughts here about communication and about working together. Email is ultimately about human behavior much more than it is about technology. The technology is simple, it's reliable. It's been in place for decades. The challenges that we have around email are mostly challenges around human relationships and expectations. And if we want other people to use email more productively, if we want people to stop emailing us in a hurry and expecting an instant response. If we want to end some of those dysfunctional practices, we have to teach and model the behavior that we want to see. We have to follow through. If we want people to send us something so that it sits in our inbox until a convenient time for us to deal with it, we have to actually deal with it and not wait for other people to interrupt us in order to be responsive.

So I want to give you a framework for thinking about everything we've talked about in the Inbox Overhaul. A framework that I call the High-Performance Triangle. Any system for high-performance has 3 key components—strategy, tools, and habits. And what I've shared with you throughout the overhaul is, primarily, strategy and a little bit on the tools side. I've shared several specific tools that I think could be very helpful to you. But what is going to make this all work for you is the habits that you develop. Now already, you're understanding of the strategy has probably shifted quite a bit because of this program, but the actions that you take to develop habits to start using new tools are what are really going to create the consistency and the long term impact from the improvements in how you handle email. So what are some of the strategies that we've talked about in the Inbox Overhaul? We've talked about using email as a communication medium and not as a Swiss Army knife.

Email is not good for everything, we want it to do a pretty narrowly defined job so that it can do that job well. Strategy-wise, we've talked about the asymmetry that we face as leaders. So many different people can email us about so many different things that might take us much longer to deal with than it took the original person to send us an email about. So you can review that section if you need to about asymmetries. We've talked about the core practice about getting current, getting all of the emails in your inbox dealt with, triaged, and out of your in box so that you can stay current. You can check email a couple times a day, get everything processed and you never have the clutter and the overwhelm. We've talked about using your mobile device as part of that strategy, but using it judiciously. Not trying to send long emails. Making phone calls when that is the best way to handle an issue and saving the things that need to be saved for your real computer, so that you can answer those more efficiently when you have a real keyboard and other reference information. We've talked about timeshifting and how timeshifting tools are often the number one missing piece in leader's system for handling email because it does come in at asynchronously. People don't know when we are going to when we're going to be ready to make a decision. You have got to be able to snooze or timeshift an email to the appropriate time and date when you are ready to deal with that or make a decision. So using a service like FollowUpThen.com is a wonderful strategy. 

And then of course you want to use the right tools, so that is the second part of our high-performance triangle. We've talked about using your mobile device in conjunction with your computer. We've talked about using Text Expander and saved email templates to make it faster to respond to certain issues that come up over and over again. We've talked about timeshifting with services like FollowUpThen.com. We've talked about other apps that you may need to use as part of your productivity ecosystem, like a task app, a calender app, maybe a paper planner. Some place to store files, like Dropbox or Google Drive. And we've talked about good old-fashioned tools like the phone and having face-to-face conversations. Now it is up to you to develop the habits that you need to make this high-performance system work for you. One of the biggest shifts that I want you to encourage you to make long-term as you adjust the way you deal with email is to stop just checking email. Stop constantly looking at your inbox and instead start processing your inbox and getting everything out of it at certain times of day. I recommend 20 minutes 3 times a day. That's probably going to be enough, if you also set aside time for the actual tasks that are arriving via email. Processing the email, triaging it, making that initial decision is a separate process from doing the work and you are going to be much less stressed and much less overwhelmed with email if you can create that separation between deciding and doing.

So once you have this system set up, it's not difficult to get your inbox empty every day, to stay current, to keep timeshifting or snoozing those emails until the appropriate time when you are ready to deal with them and make a decision. And as long as you are using the right tool for the job, you will find that email truly can be an effective leadership tool. So I hope you have enjoyed the Inbox Overhaul. I want to encourage you to take action and implement these systems in your work as a leader right away so that you can start staying on top of email more effectively, be more responsive to the people that you work with, and being less stressed by your inbox. I'm Justin Baeder and this has been the Inbox Overhaul.