Putting email in its place (and it's not the Inbox)
Managing academic email before it manages you
I remember when I got my very first email. I was in college at Tennessee Tech University, circa 1989. I didn’t have a computer, so if I wanted to use one, I had to walk across campus to a lab in the engineering building, where there was a mainframe (!) with about 30 workstations. I was officially doing statistical analysis, running SPSS locally off the mainframe; but we were also connected to Usenet (!) and one day, I discovered one of my friends had sent me a message using something called “electronic mail”. Almost immediately I was hooked. Email was fun1.
Fast forward 35 years and it’s hard to believe that email was ever remotely “fun”. It is now a monkey on our backs and a source of deep anxiety for many. It also kills a lot of our ability to do good work in academia. Some studies indicate that the average knowledge worker sends or receives over 126 work-related emails per day and checks email over 77 times a day — about once every six minutes. When you combine those facts with the additional fact that it takes about 25 minutes to recover full focus on a task following an interruption, such as checking email, you begin to see why people get so anxious about email: It’s having a compounding drain on our ability to do or think about anything besides email.
I had the privilege recently of giving a workshop, titled Intentional Email, to a group of department chairs, program directors, associate deans, and the like — people with a lot of responsibility and a lot of email. Almost three-quarters of the participants reported spending over 3 hours a day on email-related tasks (sending, composing, replying, reading) and most receive over 100 emails a day (and possibly send twice that many replies). As a former department chair, I know what that work is like, and I know that this much attention on email isn’t sustainable. Today I want to share some of the highlights of what we discussed and worked on in that workshop, because all of us in academia have similar needs.
Three basic ingredients and a law
I was only a department chair for one year so I am no expert, but it seems to me that doing good work as a chair, director, or dean involves three things.
Focus. This means putting 100% of your attention on the task at hand so you can get the task done, and done well. The opposite of focus is distraction, and when we try to do things distracted, the results are usually bad. So we want full focus when we do our work.
Clarity. This means understanding what the various people, information, projects, commitments and so on in our work and your life mean to us, and what they mean relative to each other. The opposite of clarity is ambiguity. When you are doing things but you're not sure why, or who it's for or what it's for, you're operating without clarity, and this can lead to a lack of focus and a lot of wasted energy.
Presence. This means doing a task, or communicating with a person, when you are fully "there", not just physically but emotionally and intellectually. The opposite of presence of course is absence -- being somewhere else. We've all had that experience of trying to talk with someone and their mind is elsewhere. Speaking with someone in that distracted state is frustrating and often pointless.
Focus, Clarity, and Presence are the basic ingredients needed to be an effective chair, director, or dean or even “just” a faculty member. They are also the main components of what we often call “balance”, a state in which you do your job, and do it well, but you also have the space and time to have a full life that involves things that are not work.
And that gets me to a fundamental law of academic work, particularly at the chair/director/dean level. which I call the Law of the Whole Person. This says: You have the right to be a whole person with a satisfying career and a life that has meaning to you and to the people you love. And you have the right and the responsibility to take measures that ensure you are a whole person -- doing your job and doing it well, and also having an interesting and joyful life.
The Law of the Whole Person applies to everyone, of course. But in academia, it needs to be said out loud because too often, we get the impression from the system and people within it that we don’t have the right to being a whole person: That we have to reply to emails right away, accept every meeting invitation, volunteer for every event, stay late, work weekends. It’s just not true, and before all the strategies and lifehacks for dealing with email can have traction, it’s critically important to realize that we are all fundamentally entitled to implement them.
Focus, Clarity, Presence, and the Law of the Whole Person. With those in mind, let’s look at some specific strategies for getting where we want to be with email.
Strategies for focus
“Email” and “focus” don’t often occur in the same sentence. The problem isn’t really email itself: It’s when we let email bleed into all the other parts of our life and work that are not in email, that we lose focus. The key to maintaining focus with email, in my view, is to give 100% attention to email when it’s the right time to do email, and 0% attention to it otherwise. You might do this as follows:
Set aside times during which you will handle email, give it full focus during those times, and keep email shut down otherwise. For example, schedule 8-9am and 4-5pm every day for email. During those two hours, do nothing besides email tasks — no phone calls, no “quick questions”2 or meetings, no working on budgets, etc. and certainly no distractions like social media or games. It’s two hours of heads-down email sprints. Then, when the hour is up, you shut down email entirely – not just “Control-W” to close the window but “Control-Q” to end the program. This way you will not even be aware of the notifications of new messages. (Remember how it takes 25 minutes to recover from an interruption?) You’ll continue to get new messages, but you’ll get to those when you get to them. And in the meantime, the really important work you do, which is not located in email, gets your full attention.
Automate tasks that clog up your inbox. For example, meetings should never be scheduled through email3. Those should be done with a tool like Doodle, StrawPoll, Calendly, or Outlook specifically built to pool available meeting times, saving perhaps dozens of pointless emails from being sent. Also, we often have items that involve “tickets” that can and should be handled by tools like Google Forms rather than individual emails. For example, I have a form for my students to use if they notice a data entry error in the LMS gradebook. I used to get email after email from students reporting these; now with the form, the student fills out the form, and the results go into a spreadsheet that I check once a week. If you read a lot of newsletters and listservs, set up a separate folder or label in your email for those and create a rule that automatically shunts email notifications into that folder and away from your inbox, then deal with that folder when you have time.
Do not have an “open door” policy. This is not an email strategy, but it goes well with the first strategy above. We often think that the best faculty or chairs are the ones who are available all the time. I think otherwise: The “open door policy” is a fast track to burnout and is inimical to focus. To be really good at your job, and to be a whole person, you have to be “regularly inaccessible”. This means there are times when you are freely available and times that you are totally unavailable because you have your head down getting something important done and don’t need distractions, and those times are known to everyone. The best thing I did when I was a department chair was to declare myself to be off-grid from 8-11:30am every day of the week; I instructed our office staff to turn away all visitors and decline all phone calls and meetings during those times. Then, to compensate, I set up appointment hours from 2:00-4:00 every day of the week — using Calendly to automate the appointments — where anybody and everybody could schedule a time with me. I believe I was a lot better at being a chair with this system than if I had been 100% available 100% of the time.
Strategies for clarity
Attaining clarity means banishing ambiguity. We can do that as follows:
Before you reply, clarify. The reflex when you receive an email is to reply to it. But, not all email needs a reply. If you look through your inbox right now, you will find a wide range of messages: Some are spam or irrelevant to you; some are useful information but contain no actionable items; some are things you want to think about, not now but in a couple of months; some are actionable but it’s not clear that a reply is necessary. The first thing to do with an email is not to reply to it, but clarify what it means to you – determine if it’s actionable, and organize it based on the outcome of a series of clarifying questions that I wrote about in detail in this post. Don’t reply to a message that you have not yet clarified; and don’t reply at all to a message that doesn’t need a reply. (Or if you must give a signal you’ve received an email, use an emjoi reaction.)
Use folders/labels. This is more about organizing than clarifying but organization is the logical end of clarifying. Once you understand what an email means to you through the Clarify process, make its relationship to you more permanent by putting it out of your inbox and into a folder where it can live and be found. Don’t leave emails just sitting in the inbox once they are read; the inbox is not your to-do list so extract what information you need out of it, then move the email out of the inbox and into a place suited for it. (This might be the recycle bin.)
Do regular reviews to get to Inbox Zero. That term “Inbox Zero” doesn’t necessarily refer to the state of having no emails in your inbox, although this is certainly a good and attainable goal. The “zero” refers to the amount of attention your inbox is getting at any given time (see Focus) and the number of emails you have that remain to be clarified. Sometimes it’s possible to get to this point by having regular time blocks dedicated to email processing. However most people have days where there’s still email left at the end of the day, so some additional time is needed. That’s where the Weekly Review comes in; you can also hold mini-Weekly Reviews at any time during the week where you have a few minutes.
Strategies for presence
Focus and Clarity lead to an improved Presence with people and with tasks; likewise it’s hard to be fully present when you are unfocussed and unclear. Here are some specific ways to improve presence with respect to email:
Set the expectation of consistent email replies within a reasonable fixed time frame. I tell my students that if they email me, and their email needs a reply, they can expect a reply within 48 hours if it’s during the week and first thing Monday morning if it’s on the weekend. I do not promise that I will get back with them immediately (although I often do). Despite the narrative that today’s student wants instant feedback, my students have never had a problem with this because I always deliver on that 48-hour promise. I don’t think they want instant replies; they just want dependable replies that don’t take too long. I think everyone is like this. I have an extended version of this policy baked into my email signature:
Don’t use email when a face-to-face or phone call makes more sense. I think it’s important to try to cut off the flow of email at the source whenever we can, and often we can do this by just picking up the phone or walking down the hallway. If I have a question for my Grading For Growth co-author David Clark, who holds office hours in a public student space about 50 steps away from my campus office, then if it’s his office hours time I am definitely going to ask him in person rather than email. Sometimes email is better; but not always, and voice or in-person communication conveys a lot more information in much less time than email does. And it’s literally being present with another person4.
Set and maintain boundaries around work and life, and around distinct zones of work. Just like the strategy of having set times for checking email, outside of which you give email zero attention, you can set hard boundaries around work to keep it in a box. This will look like different things for different people. Maybe for you, it’s having a rule that you will no longer grade in the evening. Or, a rule that you will say “no” to any work-related request to do something on the weekends like an event or a meeting. Your job is not a marriage and does not require 24/7 devotion in sickness and in health. If you want to have time and space to be a whole person, the system is not going to do this for you: It has to be the result of a boundary that you set and enforce. The same is true for different areas of focus or “zones” within work: A time for working on department chair stuff, a time for grading, a time for office hours, etc. The latter is better known these days as time blocking and I wrote a whole article about that.
Now you do it
Here are some exercises that I gave to the people in the workshop, that you can do at home:
Go to your email client right now and completely close the program (Control-Q not Control-W). Then, just leave it closed for an hour. Yes, there are emails coming in. No, you are not dealing with them right now. This builds the habit of not reflexively checking email every 6-7 minutes.
Go to your email client (after an hour, if you did the first exercise) and spend 15 minutes running through the Clarify process with emails, starting at the top of the inbox. If you need lists to put things, here is a starter pack.
Write an email signature like the one I use, where it says exactly when you will be checking emails and when you won’t be. Set the expectations for others.
Etc.
Here are the slides from the workshop; and here is a resource page that I used.
Shameless self-plug: If you would like me to run this workshop on your campus or online, please visit my speaker page for information about contracting with me.
Music: I am a diehard Led Zeppelin fan. I first saw this guitar cover of “No Quarter” (from my favorite Zeppelin album, Houses of the Holy) as a snippet in a commercial for Chicago Music Exchange and I had to hear the whole thing. Amazing work, and can you believe that Les Paul guitar is 66 years old?
These are never quick and are rarely even questions.
“What are some good times you all can meet?” has to be the most terrifying email sentence of all time apart from “I hope this email finds you well”.
If my department chair is reading this, she is probably laughing because I’m well known for avoiding meetings and phone calls in favor of emails.