How to Beat Inbox Overwhelm

[00:00:00] Rachel: In all our training on time management and overwhelm, one of the biggest things that people say causes them to feel stressed under pressure and overwhelmed is their inbox, the sheer volume of stuff that’s in there. So I wanna do a quick dip today talking about just why we get so overwhelmed by our inbox and how we get out of it.

[00:00:20] Rachel: This is a You Are Not a Frog quick dip, a tiny taster of the kinds of things we talk about on our full podcast episodes. I’ve chosen today’s topic to give you a helpful boost in the time it takes to have a cup of tea so you can return to whatever else you’re up to feeling energized and inspired. For more tools, tips, and insights to help you thrive at work, don’t forget to subscribe to You Are Not a Frog wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:00:46] Rachel: I’d like you to imagine for a second that you are an emergency physician, you’re an ED consultant, and you are in charge of the emergency department. Now, like any emergency department, anybody can turn up. Anybody can come in and seek help. But in your particular emergency department, what’s happening is the patients are queuing up and they are landing in the waiting room in a particular order, and the order is when they arrived, and nothing’s been shifted. So they’re just there in the order that they arrived.

[00:01:19] Rachel: You’ve only got one entrance and there’s patients that have just come ’cause they’ve stubbed their toe. They have patients that have got bleeding hands that need dealing with pretty quick. But there’s also patients that are really significantly unwell, but they’re standing in, in a line in the emergency department just waiting for somebody to see them. And they just keep coming and coming.

[00:01:42] Rachel: As well as the patients who are genuinely ill in this queue, there are some patients that just come to tell you a few things. There are some people that just wanna make you aware of something. There are some patients that are being dealt with by other doctors, but they just thought you ought to know. There are also people that are trying to sell you some things. There are people that want to update you about what they’re doing. There are some patients that just want to ask your advice. There are some patients that actually carry a very dangerous virus, and if you let them in and you talk to them for any length of time are gonna cause your whole hospital to shut down.

[00:02:19] Rachel: There are some people in that queue that don’t really know why they’re there, but they thought it would just be a good idea to turn up. And there are some people in that, in that queue that really want you to do something, but actually it’s nothing to do with you. You’re the wrong person to help ’em anyway, they should be going to the physio department. There are some that want an urgent response by close of play. They need something now, but actually it’s not really very important to you. But there are some things that actually you really want to see and you want to see them straight away that need to be flagged up.

[00:02:48] Rachel: And what’s more, you are aware of this emergency room, not just when you are there working through it, but when you are out at a restaurant, when you are walking in the park with your dog, when you’re on the beach trying to relax and have a holiday, you’re still aware that these patients are just coming in and the queue is building up. And you’re starting to worry that you might miss something important, but there’s just so many patients there.

[00:03:10] Rachel: Now, you know there are some important things that need dealing with, but you have no idea where they are or where they’ve gone. And you think that just by holding them in the room, you’ll be able to get to them at some point, but you just keep having to recheck and find out which patients which, because you haven’t really got a system of working out which patient needs seeing now, which can be left and actually, which needs just to be sent away to go see somebody else.

[00:03:32] Rachel: And what’s more, when you’re actually trying to do some different work, when you’re in a clinic, these patients in the emergency room just keep tap tapping on the shoulder. Whenever they arrive, they’re just tapping on the shoulder again saying, oh, by the way, I’m here just to let you know. And you feel really responsible for all of them. And when you’re getting too busy, you are starting to feel guilty that you haven’t got to see them, or even though you have dealt with some of the ones that are really, really urgent.

[00:03:56] Rachel: And because the patients have turned up in your emergency department, you really feel a bit obliged to, to deal with them rather than sending them over to the other emergency department that you know would be more suitable for them. And eventually you think, I am so overwhelmed, I cannot cope with this anymore. I hope you’re feeling really, really stressed.

[00:04:14] Rachel: So this undifferentiated emergency department is like your inbox, When you allow things to build up and you’ve not got any systems for working out what’s important, what needs doing now, what needs waiting for, you just feel overwhelmed. You end up putting stuff off. You can’t see the wood from the trees, and you know that there’s stuff you need to deal with, but you have no idea where it is. And so consequently you don’t delete anything. You are scared of managing it because it just feels so overwhelming.

[00:04:43] Rachel: What if I told you though, it’s not the emails that are the problem? So we often say this, we say, well, it’s my emails that the problem, if only everybody would stop sending me emails. And then what happens is we spend all our time focusing on these emails and managing the emails. Like the emails are the work. We end up being a slave to our email, and really, really stressed because we have no control over the emails that land in our inbox, and when we’re out of control, that’s a very stressful place to be.

[00:05:12] Rachel: And there could be unlimited demand. There can be unlimited emails that come into your box. You have no control over that. But what if we think about this differently? It is the undifferentiated tasks all landing at once in a completely random manner that’s dependent on the person that sent them rather than dependent on the person that’s received them. That is the problem. That’s what causes overwhelm, and if we don’t have a system to manage that, if we don’t have a triage system, if we don’t have different holding areas, and if we don’t know exactly how we are gonna deal with those, then we’re in problems, because our to-do list, our emails will never be finished.

[00:05:51] Rachel: Now, the good thing that realizing that it’s the undifferentiated tasks landing in an asynchronous manner that’s the problem is that we can do something about that, we can control that rather than being cross and stressed and upset about the number of emails that are coming in in the first place.

[00:06:08] Rachel: So in this quick dip, I’m going to talk to you about some quick strategies to manage your inbox. I’m gonna talk you through the things that I do to manage mine, just in case it’s helpful, and I’m gonna talk about the mindset shift needed and the mistakes that we all make.

[00:06:20] Rachel: So what strategies really, really work? Well, I’ve gleaned these from lots of different things, but I do just want to name check Graham Allcott here. He’s got some absolutely brilliant advice in his book, the Productivity Ninja. He’s been on the podcast before. He’s speaking at FrogFest Virtual on May the seventh so do check that out.

[00:06:36] Rachel: And I am just gonna also say another disclaimer, and I am not talking here about clinical emails, I’m not talking about patient management.’ Cause in the UK I know that a lot of our patient management stuff isn’t sent by email, it’s sent in other systems, and that’s as it should be.

[00:06:51] Rachel: But you may have some clinical emails that you need to answer. I’m not giving advice about that, however, you can use specific folders for those clinical tasks that you know you need to have. And I would say the number one thing would be separating that from the melee of everything else that’s in your inbox so that you know that you are definitely always on top of that clinical stuff, that clinical patient care stuff. I’m gonna mainly be talking about everything else though, because I don’t give clinical advice here.

[00:07:18] Rachel: And that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? That actually, if you are also having clinical queries dropping into your inbox, how do you tell, what’s the clinical stuff that you really need to get to and answer? What’s the stuff you don’t need to answer? What’s the other things? So the first thing you need to do is have some sort of system for triaging your emails.

[00:07:37] Rachel: And when I say triage your emails, I’m not just talking about looking through them.’ Cause anybody can do that. And the problem is a lot of it’s just look through our emails at times where we can’t do anything about it. So we check them, we read them, but they’re sitting at the back of our mind ’cause we’ve not done anything with them.

[00:07:51] Rachel: Can I suggest number one strategy is only check your emails when you can do something about them. So checking them while you’re on a conference call, not a good idea. Checking them in the 20 seconds you have between patients, not a good idea. Wait till you’ve got a slot of time and I would say at least 10 minutes where you can actually either number one, deal with anything that’s gonna take less than two minutes to deal with, so a quick reply with a bit of information that somebody needs. If it’s gonna take you less than two minutes to reply or action it, then just do it on the spot. That means that do not check your emails if you have less than two minutes free.

[00:08:29] Rachel: Secondly, you need to have somewhere to put the emails that need actioning. And one of the many mistakes I see people making is they just have too many different email folders and then their job seems to be filing their emails. And then the problem is when they come to try and find stuff, they never know quite where they filed them.

[00:08:46] Rachel: I have got over this by having very few email folders, but actually the ones I have, I use all the time. This is what works for me. There are six main folders that I use all the time.

[00:08:58] Rachel: The first two folders are my action folders. I actually have two action folders because I was finding that just having one action folder meant everything went in there and I wasn’t really sure where the urgent actions were.

[00:09:10] Rachel: So I’ve got two folders. My very first folder now is urgent action. That is stuff that I know I must reply to an action. I really need to do that in the next 24, 48 hours. That’s where I put things where I really don’t want to miss them and I know I need to reply to them.

[00:09:26] Rachel: So many of us leave the stuff that needs actioning in our inbox, but then that just builds up and up and up. And then we have got no visibility about what’s urgent and what’s not. So anything that needs an urgent action, I stick in my urgent action inbox and I use the number one, so it goes to the top of my folder list.

[00:09:42] Rachel: Number two is action. So I put stuff that needs action in there. The stuff that I intend to take action on. Now, a bit of a confession. Sometimes I don’t get to those actions. I know I’m never gonna get to the bottom of my to-do list, but I know that the emails that need actioning are there if I choose to do them. Quite often, by the time I get to them, it’s already been sorted.

[00:10:04] Rachel: Now, sometimes in my inbox, there’s some stuff that I’m really interested in. I’d like to read. I’d like to save for a rainy day and read it, but I don’t have time there. And then. Rather than leaving in my inbox, I put it in number three, bacon, good spam. I got that from Graham Allcott, so thank you, Graham. That’s been a lifesaver. So interesting articles, things I’d like to read, I just put in there. You don’t need to call it spam. You could just call it read, read someday. But I quite like the bacon thing, so I put it in there. Anything I think I might like to read at some point.

[00:10:31] Rachel: Now there’s a differentiation here. If you have some urgent alerts or things that you know you need to read, just put that in action. Don’t put it in a read some day ’cause you will never read it some day, put it into action if you know you need to read that.

[00:10:45] Rachel: Number four folder is confirmations and safe place. So this is where I put things like tickets, logins for things, things I know I am going to need to find at a later date, but they don’t need action, so I just put them in confirmations. safe place. That’s my fourth folder.

[00:10:59] Rachel: Number five, finance. So anything to do with Finance, bills, invoicing, I just put in that folder. You might not need that, but this is where you might have another folder for something that is coming in a lot for you that you know you need to keep fairly separate. So that could be the clinical stuff that you need to have hold of and you need to have visibility for.

[00:11:20] Rachel: And finally, I have my archive folder. So any emails that I want to keep but I don’t need to reply. I don’t need to read again, but I might need them at another time. I just stick them in archive. When I first sorted my inbox, I put everything from 2023 backwards in one archive folder, and my current archive folder, I’ve got 20, 24 onwards. So any emails that are dealt with, I just put there.

[00:11:43] Rachel: Now I know some of you don’t have that luxury of being able to keep endless emails. Some of you have limits on your inbox, so. If you just keep your archive folder maybe by date and then you can get rid of the ones that are really old that you’re probably not gonna need, or maybe have an archive folder of important ones to keep, and then everything else, put in another archive folder of ones that can be deleted, but you’ll keep them until you’re inbox gets full. So that is six folders. Your urgent action folder, your action folder, your bacon good spam folder of stuff you you wanna read at some point your confirmation safe place folder, your finance and your archive folder.

[00:12:19] Rachel: The reason why this works is that you can search. You do not need to file every single email that you have under a particular project because the most email servers, you can just search for something you just put in and it will come up or search by the person or the project or whatever. Actually takes much, much longer to think about where you need to file it. So this really works for me and I’ve got Graham Allcott to for that.

[00:12:42] Rachel: So that is how I triage my stuff. If it’s less than two minutes, I will reply straight away. If it needs urgent action in the next 24, 48 hours, I will put it in my urgent action folder. And if it needs action, I’ll put it in my action folder.

[00:12:55] Rachel: Now there are things you can do to even stop all these emails landing in you in the first place. You can put rules on your inbox, so if it’s sent from a certain person, you can put it into a certain folder. You can label stuff as junk. If there’s stuff that you might need to refer to that’s maybe coming from the local trust and you just need to keep in a folder, you can set up rules where it goes straight there, and then you can go into it whenever you need to. Make it work for you.

[00:13:19] Rachel: The next strategy that I find incredibly helpful is to have automatic responses. There are three types of ways you can do this. So firstly, you could have an auto reply that just says when you’re gonna check the emails and when people can expect a response from you. And if it’s really urgent, here’s another email that they should email instead.

[00:13:36] Rachel: The other thing is I have hundreds of email signatures. I use Outlook, you can save a signature. So these are replies that I often give to people. One of them is, why don’t you book a podcast? Here’s my booking link, here’s everything you need to do, here’s how to get on. Here’s the equipment that you need. So I’ll send that to people so I’m not repeating myself all the time. So if there’s something you say time and time again, then use your email signatures.

[00:14:00] Rachel: If you don’t have that facility, just get a Word document and put the usual responses that you use into a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet and cut and paste your replies. Honestly, it will save you so much time.

[00:14:12] Rachel: So we’ve talked about triaging your inbox and setting up those folders. We’ve talked about using standard responses, signatures, cut and paste stuff. And then there’s some stuff that you can do when you reply to people.

[00:14:25] Rachel: I heard somewhere that every email that you send generates 1.3 emails back. So email can be exponential. And I’ve got this secret pet hate when people ask me to do something and I go, yeah, sure, I’ve done it. And then they’ll go, thank you, and I’ll think I’ve gotta go back going well, thank you, great, brilliant, see you soon. You know, and you’ve got this endless email trail. You can prevent this by just sending really short, brief emails.

[00:14:49] Rachel: Put what you want in the subject line. Be very clear about what this email is for. Do you want somebody to do something? Do you want ’em to read something? Is it for your information only? So in the email, just put action this, FYI, this.

[00:15:05] Rachel: If you are applying to someone and you want to CC them, but you don’t wanna be CC’d on everything else, you could say, no need to CC me, or you can say to someone I’m moving you to BCC so that you’re not included in the trail from now on ’cause I don’t want to clog up your inbox.

[00:15:18] Rachel: You can also use the phrase NNTR at the end of the message. No need to reply, which is really helpful because then you get away from this sort of circular thank you, no worries, I hope it’s not too much trouble type conversation. You can also send an email with a request in the title with EOM, end of message, that’s it. Could you do such and such? End of message.

[00:15:37] Rachel: But beware that one, because one of the big mistakes we make is using our email as our task list. So of course we never want to delete any emails because it’s there to remind us to do something. I can’t stress this fully enough, you need to have a task list somewhere else. Whether it’s just a paper list, that’s totally fine. A paper diary, whether it’s a project management tool like Asana or Trello or Slack. Many of you have clinical patient management tools. You’ve got places for tasks in there as well. Plus you’ve got, tasks that actually attach to the patient’s records. So all the messages you get about that are actually attached to the project that you need.

[00:16:15] Rachel: One of the biggest takeaways I found about how to get over email overwhelm is to keep most of our tasks off email. If you are working on a project with a team, with a group of people, then get everything off the email. Use a system where you communicate in another way. And that can just be as simple as a Google Doc and you put comments and queries and things on that doc. So when you’re doing that task, you can look at it. And it’s under your control when you check it, not about when the emails are coming in.

[00:16:46] Rachel: So my team, whenever tasks come at me via email, I always say, can we just put this on Asana, which is our, our project management system. And then it’s much easier to deal with. And you’ve got all the messages and all the subtasks and everything with that one project, rather than having to just look, look around in your inbox, say, well I saw an email about that somewhere. Or where was that document that I needed?

[00:17:06] Rachel: So, you know, do investigate project management tools. Uh, we don’t use them much in healthcare, but honestly they are brilliant. And if anyone wants to find out more about some of them, I can show you around some of them. ’cause they’re really helpful.

[00:17:19] Rachel: And finally, check your emails less. If you check them all the time, you’ll just get this thing called task confetti, which just means that you’ve always got this stuff to do. It’s always in your head, you’re always thinking about it, but you’re not necessarily actually getting the work done. Limit your email checking in, ideally less than once a day, but that might cause some of you to have palpitations.

[00:17:38] Rachel: But you know, what about once a day? What about checking them after lunch? Dealing with anything urgent, and then setting aside time to actually go through the tasks that are there. Time block that time in for you. Then you’re not constantly being disturbed by these different tasks coming in. You are in control over what you’re checking. And make sure people understand that if they need you urgently, they need to contact you in a different way.

[00:18:03] Rachel: Most of us when we get to work, the first thing we do is check our emails. For me, the most important productivity hack that I’ve ever learned is to do something else when I first start working. Obviously if you’ve got a clinic or a a list or a ward round, you just gotta get straight on with that. But if you can spend half an hour doing some deep work, thinking about a project that you’ve got to do, working on that rather than getting into the emails, rather than getting the outside world to disturb you all the time.

[00:18:28] Rachel: And while we’re at it, turn off all your email notifications. The amount of people I know that just have them pinging into the top of the screen the whole time. Interruptions are a total productivity killer. Most of the time you can’t do anything about that email right there and then, ’cause you’re in the middle of something else. So why have you got it pinging in? Only check your emails when you want to and do not have your notifications on the interrupt you.

[00:18:51] Rachel: So what mistakes do we make in all of this? Well, there are quite a few, and we need a bit of a mindset shift around email.

[00:18:57] Rachel: The first one is just having email as your task master. Email is a tool. Lots of people I know spend so much time managing their emails. Email is a tool where your tasks come in. It’s a great tool for communication, but it’s a very, very poor master, so you control it rather than the other way round.

[00:19:17] Rachel: Secondly, good enough and done is better than perfect and pending. Often with emails, you just need to respond. Keep it brief, don’t worry about it being perfect. It is not a handwritten letter, it is a reply. Having said that though, always be careful. So not just fire off emails without thinking. These are a written record, they can be retrieved. If something difficult comes at you and you just fire off a quick response, then 9 times outta 10 you’ll regret what you said. And tone of voice is very, very difficult to get across well in an email.

[00:19:50] Rachel: If it’s something that feels tricky, send a email to yourself, leave it overnight, review it in the morning, and you’ll be so pleased that you did. ’cause you’ll then probably change completely what you’ve written. And if it is a tricky subject or a tricky topic, then can I suggest you don’t use email, you just get on the phone and have a conversation?

[00:20:08] Rachel: Sentiment, feelings, tone of voice. Email’s a really bad way to convey that. But talking to someone, you can say, look, this might sound harsh or whatever, but I just wanted to share this with you. I hope it’s okay. So much more empathy in a conversation than in an email. So don’t substitute emails for difficult conversations. Always have those face to face. And get used to sending short, and succinct emails that do not need to be perfect.

[00:20:33] Rachel: I know one CEOI heard of refused to scroll, so if there was an email where he had to scroll, he would just not read it. So try and keep them short, brief, and to the point.

[00:20:43] Rachel: The next mistake we make is getting obsessed with Inbox zero. Some people are so obsessed with it, they spend all their time just trying to get to inbox zero, and that’s just a myth, isn’t it? Because if you are measuring your success by the amount of emails in your inbox or how clear it is, then you are at other people’s becking call the whole time. If someone just decides to send you 10 emails that will need actions, then you’re gonna feel really stressed about that. So inbox zero is a bit of a myth. What you are aiming at is an inbox where, you know what everything is and where it is, there’s no surprises. That’s well organized and it doesn’t need to be that there are no emails waiting for you in your inbox.

[00:21:22] Rachel: The next mistake we make is thinking that we’ve got to reply as soon as they come in. So email is asynchronous. It’s up to the sender when they arrive in your inbox. Emails are sent at the sender’s convenience, not the receiver’s convenience. So you do not need to reply straight away. You need to prioritize them depending on how urgent they are and how important they are. And another mistake we can make with that is that just because an email has a snotty aggressive tone doesn’t mean that it’s urgent. Or just because it’s sent by somebody very, very important. That doesn’t mean it’s urgent either. So judge the by its content, not by its tone or by who sent it. And if you can batch the emails up and do a certain email task that’s come to you at the same time, that will be so much better.

[00:22:06] Rachel: The next mistake we make is that thinking that if our inbox feels chaotic, our whole lives are chaotic. And yes, I get, I get that it’s difficult if our front lobby was really, really cluttered, or that ED department feels really, really messy and that so many people are in, it doesn’t mean that the rest of your life is, or the rest of your work is. It just means you’ve got a job to source out that little bit there.

[00:22:28] Rachel: It doesn’t mean that everything is bad, so clear it, declutter it just like you would a room in your house. But don’t beat yourself up about it and don’t give it too much room in your head.

[00:22:41] Rachel: And the final mindset shift that we need around email is accept that you are not going to answer everything. Unsubscribe from as much as possible. And just because somebody has emailed you, just ’cause they turn up in your, in your ED or knock on your front door, doesn’t mean that you are under any obligation to respond.

[00:22:59] Rachel: Now, we do feel bad. We don’t like ghosting people, but you know, really just because someone has decided that they want some advice from me, does that mean I’m obliged to give them that advice? No, I am not. Just because a task ends up in your inbox, are you obliged to do it? No. You can just as easily delegate that to somebody else or ignore it completely.

[00:23:20] Rachel: I’m not saying you need to be rude or a bad person, it’s just that I have noticed it in myself, obviously I get a lot of emails from people and I absolutely love hearing from listeners to the podcast and, and talking to people, but I sometimes feel really obliged that someone’s asked me for advice on something that I ought to give it just because they sent me an email.

[00:23:39] Rachel: Now, that’s fine if I’m receiving like one request a week, but if I was receiving a hundred requests a week, I’m not, but if I was, does that mean I’m obliged to answer every single one just because they’ve sent it to me? No, of course not. I can’t possibly do that. But we feel obliged, we feel guilty, and we feel like we’ve been a bad person if somehow it’s unanswered.

[00:24:01] Rachel: Now you’ve got a couple of options here. Number one, you can just ignore it and delete, and you know the delete button is your friend. If you’re worried about deleting something, just move it into archive. You can always find it later if you need to. If you think you might reply, put it into action and you’ll probably end up deleting it anyway later on.

[00:24:17] Rachel: But you could just have an email signature saying I’m sorry I’m unable to do this ’cause I’m at capacity if you want to, or sorry I’m not the right person to ask, or I’m not interested in this, thank you for your email. There’s all these standard replies that you can use.

[00:24:31] Rachel: And we have created some Get Your Time Back, Say No email templates, which contain loads of email signatures which we use to limit our tasks from our inbox to say no to people, to renegotiate or delegate, or redirect tasks to people. And you can get hold of that say No email templates by either joining our FrogXtra Gold membership or by booking a place on our Urgency Trap masterclass.

[00:24:56] Rachel: So let’s start to get over some of the overwhelm, the shame, the fear and the guilt around emails. All they are is the way that tasks and information is coming at you. You can’t control how many are sent or what arrives in your inbox. What you can control is how you manage them, how you deal with them, and like any other task, how you prioritize your work, the things you’ll say yes to, and the things you’ll say no to.

[00:25:21] Rachel: I hope that was helpful. If you have any hot tips then can I suggest you post them in our You Are Not Frog Facebook group or get in touch on Instagram or email me at hello@youarenotafrog.com and we will share the best ones in a future podcast. I hope there’s been something in there that’s been useful to you and I’ll see you for the next quick dip.