Why you shouldn’t use your email as a to-do list
Email and actions lists don't mix -- here's how to make them work together
The last couple of posts here have been serious and high-level. Today, since most of us in academia are closing out our semesters and there’s a million things to do and track, let’s take things down to a more practical, yet still pretty serious levels and talk about two things that are front of mind for all us: Our email inboxes and our to-do lists. And in particular, what happens if we try to merge the two.
There are a lot of people out there who believe in using their email inboxes as their to-do lists. Instead of having email and to-do items in separate places, the idea is to use emails as tasks, or as reminders of tasks, and the inbox as a list of those tasks. Given the Chernobyl-like radiation of negative vibes emanating from both email inboxes and to-do lists individually, it seems crazy to me that people would want to merge them together, but it’s true. Whenever I post something about GTD processes on social media there are several replies from people who say “I don’t need to clarify what’s in my inbox, because I use it as my task list.”
This happens often enough that I wanted today to explain why this is a bad idea and what we should be doing instead.
The case for using email as a to-do list
Using your email as a to-do list is one of those “some of the people all the time, all the people some of the time” things: Some will literally use email for all their to-dos; but even if you don’t, you might be tempted to leave an email or several emails sitting in your inbox, unprocessed, so that you can use them as action items or reminders of action items. This is not a good idea, but it’s not totally bad:
It keeps everything in one place. Rather than hopping back and forth from email to task managers and possibly other tools, and paying the costs of context switching, if all your to-do items just stay in your email client then it’s one tool for everything. There’s no copying or forwarding emails from one place to another, and you can manage tasks directly from the source.
I can email stuff to myself. It’s very easy to use email as a capture tool: Email is on the “share” button options for everything, and if I have a passing thought I can just compose a quick email to myself, and presto – it’s captured.
I already have email as a tool that I can use for free. Email is probably the one technology that everybody in academia (well, almost everybody) uses. And it’s free — either something like Gmail that is free for everyone, or it’s your university-sponsored Gmail or Outlook account.
There is a grain of truth in each of these points. Context-switching is bad, and it is good to have as few tools as possible and spend as little on them as possible, and email is a very handy capture tool. But that doesn’t mean email is a good choice for managing tasks.
What a functioning “to-do” list looks like
To see why, let’s envision the perfect to-do list. Actually if it’s perfect, it may not be a single list of tasks but rather a collection of lists, split up into contexts and projects. But go with it for now. In a productive and functional to-do list:
Each entry is an actionable item. If there’s no verb that describes what you are supposed to do to complete the entry, it’s not a “to-do” item.
Each entry is a single actionable item. There are no “double-barrelled” items – where there’s more than one action bundled together. Each entry should be one actionable thing. If it’s more complex than that, the individual items are broken out and each one is its own entry.
Each entry takes longer than 2 minutes to do. Otherwise, you should just do it on the spot — this is the all-important 2 Minute Rule.
Each entry is intended for you to do. You should be the right or best person to perform that action. Otherwise, it should be delegated or forwarded to the right person.
Each entry represents a commitment to doing it as soon as possible. If you don’t intend to do it any time soon, then it doesn’t go on the to-do list but a separate list for “Someday/Maybe” items so you don’t waste CPU cycles thinking about a task you don’t plan on doing. (If you’re not sure what you intend about the entry… decide.)
A to-do list that’s designed intentionally is just a small subset of what you capture, and everything else should be either trashed, or cached somewhere in another location that is out of sight/out of mind until you review it (which you should do at least weekly).
Why email clients are not functional to-do lists
One of the articles that is in favor of using email as a to-do list states that “each e-mail is a task that can be responded to, flagged for follow up or deleted etc.” This could not be more wrong:
Emails are not often tasks in the first place. Many times they’re spam, or otherwise irrelevant to you. Other times, they may be relevant, but they’re just information, like the minutes from a meeting or an update on someone else’s work. You may need to keep the email around for reference purposes but it’s not a “to-do” item in any real sense.
Even when emails do represent actionable tasks, there is rarely a one-to-one correspondence between email messages and actions. Many emails contain several, possibly dozens of actionable items and it’s your job to tease them apart before you enter them into a to-do list. An email is not “a” task, it is usually a lot of tasks, and those should be listed separately.
And even more commonly, an email is not merely a lot of tasks, but a bucket of heterogenous stuff, a combination of irrelevant information, information you’d like to keep but can’t really act upon, and somewhere between 0 and infinity items that are truly actionable, some but not all of which may be best done by you. Something this mixed can’t seriously be thought of as a to-do list item.
Then there’s what I call “quasi-actionable” items. Imagine, for example, getting an email with a document attached along with the instructions “Take a look at this”. Clearly there’s more intended for you to do than simply “take a look”, but what is it? What is the action you am supposed to perform here? Is there any action at all? It requires more email back-and-forth to actually determine what the task is, if indeed it is anything.
Finally, I think a large portion of the emails we receive, even if they’re single actionable items, don’t warrant a commitment to act on them as soon as possible. They are “Someday/Maybe” items instead. I think a lot of faculty make a big mistake by thinking that every email is a request for them to do something. This isn’t always the case! But if you have this mindset, you create mountains of work for yourself and an overflowing to-do list. No wonder we have such anxiety about both to-do lists and email1.
What should you do instead?
The first and most important thing is to realize that email and to-do lists serve separate purposes and should be kept separate. Email is for communication and, to some degree, archiving information for reference. To-do lists — or next actions lists, as I prefer to think of them — are lists of reminders write to yourself of the things you’ve committed to doing. Emails can remind you of these things too, but a reminder is only useful if it is clearly and simply stated and most emails just aren’t very good at this.
On the other hand, we do want our next actions list to be in sync with our email and any other “inbox” where items get captured — we don’t want commitments to slip through any cracks. Making that a reality involves an unavoidable step: Processing each email until we have extracted everything useful from it and put it into the right place. I say this is an unavoidable step, but it’s actually two steps: Clarifying, and Organizing.
Briefly, “clarifying” means iterating through your inbox one email at a time and figuring out what it means to you: Is it trash, or irrelevant? Is it actionable, or just information? If it’s actionable, can it be done in 2 minutes? If not, am I supposed to do it? If so, then is it one action, or several? If several, what is the next action I should take? Every email has to be clarified because email is an exceptionally unclear medium; that’s one of the reasons we dislike it so much.
And then, “organizing” means what you think it means: Getting each item into the place that suits it the most. Most actionable items don’t belong in the same, monolithic list. Instead it makes more sense to have a collection of lists, each for use in different contexts: A list for items I can only do (or which are best done) while on the phone, another list for stuff to be done at my house, another list for stuff to be done on campus, and so on. That way, if I’m on campus, I can pull up the “Campus” list and ignore the others, which helps me get the right things done2.
So, the essential steps are to spend time every day processing through your inbox, clarifying each email (yes, all of them), and putting everything in the right place — and then deleting the emails or moving them to a reference folder, outside of your inbox.
I have learned that many people who say they use email as their to-do list — in whole or in part — do so because they just don’t want to do the steps of Clarifying or Organizing. I get it; it sounds like a lot of work and who has time for that? However what I’ve found is that this doesn’t take as much time as you think, if you have a good workflow (see below); and it’s a lot easier to keep things organized than it is to get things organized. It may take a weekend to clean up your inbox the first time. After that, it’s not so bad. And I believe I have freed up countless hours of time that aren’t tied up with trying to figure out what I am supposed to do next, because my actual to-dos are buried in my email.
Workflows
I’m a Todoist user and it couldn’t be simpler to process my inbox. You can assign a unique email address to any project in Todoist, or to the Todoist inbox, and when you forward an email to that address, the subject line appears as a task in Todoist that includes the body of the email and all attachments. So if an email does happen to correspond to a single task, I can just forward it, change the subject line to a description of the task, then hit send, and it shows up in Todoist where I can drag and drop that task into an appropriate context or project list. Many other digital task managers have this functionality as well.
If an email is a “bucket of stuff” — actionable, quasi-actionable, un-actionable, and irrelevant information all put together — then forwarding it into Todoist isn’t a good idea. Instead, you have to go through that email and extract information from it by asking, Why am I getting this email? What actions are being asked of me? What information needs to be kept? And as the details emerge, write them down on your actions lists (or the Someday/Maybe list, etc.). This is a task best approached with impatience; I aim to spend no more than 60 seconds with each one, preferably about ⅙ of that time3.
Having sucked all the useful stuff out of the email, I can then delete it or stick it in a folder in case I need it later. This is not frictionless, I realize. But it’s necessary; it’s also a good argument for writing better emails, so the recipient doesn’t have to work so hard.
Now You Do It
Prerequisites: If you are unfamiliar with the Clarify and Organize concepts above, those are part of the larger Getting Things Done approach that I write about here a lot. I would go back and read the Capture, Clarify, and Organize articles in my GTD for Academics series to put this into context first.
Decide on a system for holding your actions lists (what I am calling the “to do” list). This doesn’t have to be fancy, or a paid product. In fact simplicity is essential. You might consider just using some Google Docs (or a single Google Doc with multiple tabs). You can even use a plain paper notebook.
Set a timer for 20 minutes. Shut off all notifications but keep your email open. Then, for 20 minutes, go through as many email inbox items as you can and run them through the Clarify process, and add actionable items to your next actions list. Although I mentioned it’s better in my view to have multiple lists for different contexts, if that feels too complicated or weird, just dump all action items into one big list. Once you have processed through an email, delete/archive it or move it into a folder – get it out of your inbox.
When the timer goes off, stop. How many emails did you process? In my view being able to get through 10 emails in 20 minutes is pretty good if you are a novice.
Etc.
Speaking of Google Docs, an interesting and well-made alternative to the Google Office suite is the combo of Proton Drive and Proton Mail. Proton is end-to-end encrypted and integrates nicely into existing operating systems. I’m experimenting with the suite as a place for my music-related files and communications. There’s an ample free version and affordable paid plans.
If you’re feeling more ambitious than Google Docs or Proton Drive, a lot of people swear by Google Sheets as a way of implementing GTD. I tried this once and preferred Todoist, but it’s a cool idea that works well in certain situations.
If you’re feeling really ambitious, you might try using a database to track your next actions. Nocodb is a no-code database (hence the name) that comes highly recommended by Josh Brake of The Absent Minded Professor.
Music: According to my Spotify Wrapped, I spent 21,670 minutes on that app in 2024 (so far!) which is the equivalent of 15 straight days spent listening to music 24/7. I’m told that this is a lot. One of my top-5 artists was Otis Redding, so in his honor, here’s his iconic performance of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” at the Monterey Pop Festival, featuring the legendary Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass even though he didn’t get a lot of camera time in this recording.
There are other reasons that email is not a good to-do list. In an actual list of to-do items, you have control over what the items say (“Contact department head about tenure portfolio”) but in email, you cannot change the subject line or otherwise alter the summary that appears in your client. You cannot, in most cases, change the ordering of the emails; it’s always “earliest first” which worsens the tendency toward the “latest and loudest”. Filtering emails can be a pain too; Outlook and Gmail allow tagging emails with labels (or “categories”) but displaying only emails with a particular label is hit-and-miss. (Gmail is pretty good at it; Outlook is generally terrible.)
Like most things, it’s more complicated than what I am making it out to be. In today’s world for example it’s hard to know what a “context” really is, especially when so much of our work can be done literally anywhere as long as there’s wifi and a laptop. There’s a sizeable GTD contingent that simply doesn’t use contexts. I do; maybe more on that in another post.
The majority of the email I get seems to be spam or otherwise irrelevant, so I think the average really is pretty close to 10 seconds per email, although I’ve never tracked it officially. I know I can process through an inbox of 50 emails most days within 10 minutes.