How to FINALLY Get on Top of Your Emails

[00:00:00] Rachel: Your inbox is somebody else’s to-do list. Now, LinkedIn, productivity books, and podcasts are awashed with sentiments like this, trying to give us more autonomy over our inboxes. But it doesn’t always help, especially if you are working in a high stress, high sex job and juggling urgent information about patients with rota changes, purchase notifications, and newsletters. You need more than a glib one liner. You need a system that works.

[00:00:25] Rachel: That’s why this week I’m joined by Dr. Stephen Ginn, a psychiatrist who got in touch with the show and shared a great article he’d written about how to approach managing your email in healthcare. I liked it so much that I invited him on the podcast as a guest so he can share it with you.

[00:00:40] Rachel: In this episode, we go deep into why so many of us are wrestling with our inboxes, how we can get some control over what comes in, and start advising our own system for keeping things organized rather than following the latest advice on Instagram.

[00:00:56] Rachel: If you’re in a high stress, high stakes, still blank medicine, and you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed, burning out or getting out are not your only options. I’m Dr. Rachel Morris, and welcome to You Are Not a Frog.

[00:01:13] Stephen: My name’s Stephen Ginn, and I’m a consultant psychiatrist working in Westminster.

[00:01:17] Rachel: Great to have you on the podcast, Stephen. I wanna just cut straight to the chase. Do we have a particular problem with email as senior healthcare professionals in the NHS?

[00:01:25] Stephen: I think, I think the answer to that is yes. We receiving an avalanche of messages every day, and what we are faced at is having jobs where we are trying to do the job and also just trying to be in a constant chatter about the jobs we’re trying to do all the time. And I think it’s, it’s, it could be close to impossible for some people.

[00:01:40] Stephen: So I’ve, I’ve, I’ve written an article which was published last year in Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, all about email. My motivation for writing that is the way people used to talk about email in my, one of my previous jobs was like this thing that they were subjected to, that they had no control over.

[00:01:55] Rachel: It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because yeah. In our training sessions that we do, we say, what’s stopping you, giving your best at work right now? And often we get the, uh, answer of workload, and then when you delve deeper into that, it’s often emails. And so when we try and classify what their workload is and if it’s urgent and important or urgent, not important, et cetera, et cetera, people just put emails in every single box.

[00:02:19] Rachel: And what I noticed was that people are talking about emails as work, but emails are actually just the way that work comes to us, presumably. Or do you see emails as, as the work themselves?

[00:02:31] Stephen: It’s everything, isn’t it? It’s, it’s emails, like the glue that holds, holds what we’re doing together. So, um, there’s a very interesting book written about this called World Without Email

[00:02:41] Rachel: Love that book. It’s brilliant. Isn’t

[00:02:42] Stephen: Yeah.

[00:02:43] Rachel: Cal Newport is it?

[00:02:44] Stephen: Cal Newport. Yeah, so Cal Newport has written a really interesting book about email called A World Without Email. Email has completely changed the way we work. And he describes us as having this sort of hive mind where we are both trying to do the work and also commenting about the work at the same time with this sort of avalanche of messages coming to it.

[00:03:01] Stephen: And of course, it’s, it’s, it’s developed organically and so it’s become, it’s, it’s, no one I don’t think would design email the way it is at the moment. So it’s become this, this, um, sort of message inbox where everything comes in the same place. So the decision architecture of the thing, the way it’s sort of all pointing, it doesn’t work towards a particularly sort of sustainable or useful day often.

[00:03:23] Stephen: That said, I mean, I think we just need to keep in mind, um, email is amazing. I’m not here to say that email is, you know, the devil incarnate. Actually email’s amazing. I I mean, I actually, you know, one of the things I suppose I was trying to do with, with email is to rehabilitate it. ‘Cause the idea that we can send a message to someone on the other side of the world and they can read it whenever they like and get back to us immediately, I mean, that’s extraordinary, isn’t it?

[00:03:44] Stephen: So it is great, but it’s sort of taking over our lives and I think, like you say, for some people it’s, it’s slightly killing them or very much killing them. In fact.

[00:03:52] Rachel: I think it’s that disempowered feeling that we get with email. And like you said at the beginning, control is a huge issue and we know that control is one of the, the workplace causes for stress and for burnout. And people, like you said, say, I have no control over my email, which in a way is right. We don’t necessarily have that much control over things that land in our inbox unless we put rules on or, or filters or we’ve got a particularly vicious spam filter. But in a way, then, then we lose control over what does get through and what doesn’t get through. And I’ve lost messages because they’ve just gone into spam and I’ve not seen some really important messages.

[00:04:29] Stephen: Well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna challenge you a bit one if I can. Uh, Rachel. Um, I think we do have a bit of control. I mean, sure we don’t, we don’t have control of what comes in, but we, we do, we can train people about how to email us. And we can be the change we wanna see in the world so we can, we can sort of use email sensibly.

[00:04:43] Stephen: There are rules and filters that you can put in which bring things down. You can, I mean, this is what I talk about in the article. You can, you can reduce a lot of the emails you’re getting. You know, every time you sign up to something, people will try and send, you an enormous amount of emails about it. And all these things can be reduced.

[00:04:56] Rachel: Yeah, because we do have choice, don’t we? A lot about the amount of notifica notifications via email that we get, and there are some emails that we shouldn’t even be looking at. We just delete if we know we don’t want them.

[00:05:07] Stephen: Absolutely. I wonder whether though, uh, I wonder whether the way we are with our emails just sort of mirrors the way we are with our jobs in general. So is it, is it that if you, if you struggle with your emails, are you struggling in general to say no? And does it to do the two things work together? It seems unlikely to me that someone is, is finding the rest of their job quite straightforward and able to say no, and knowing all about boundaries and listen to your, um, episodes on it versus, you know, and then email is the only problem. I think probably the two things go together.

[00:05:32] Stephen: In a way, email could be a sort of a fairly low stakes way of trying to explore how to put boundaries in with stuff. So I, um, all your email, I get, I get your emails, I’m on your list, but they all go into a Rachel Morris box, so, and I read them every so often.

[00:05:45] Rachel: So how do you set, how do you set that up, Stephen? Because lots of us don’t even know how to set that, that rule up that you can put emails into a box.

[00:05:51] Stephen: Okay, well, I mean, I suppose it depends what software package you’re using, but most of us are using, um, I mean, to get very much into the detail here, most people are probably on an nhs.net email and you, um, I think the easiest way to do that is to, if you log in on the online, on the browser, then whenever you receive an email, there’ll be a little three dots at the, I think the top hand corner of the email. If you click on that, it’ll say Add rule from this message, and it allows you to add a rule. And if you set up a folder called, in my case Rachel Morris, set up a folder and say every time this message comes, put it in this folder and you can decide whether the market is red or not. And then you can just look at that folder whenever you fancy it or not.

[00:06:26] Rachel: Does that work on Outlook as well? Is that an

[00:06:27] Stephen: That is, Yeah. again, it’s a little bit complicated ’cause essentially you can use the desktop app or you can use the online one. The online one I think is a little bit easier.

[00:06:34] Rachel: Okay. great. So that, that, that’s what we mean by an email rule. It’s when you get an email from a particular person, it can go into a folder or it could, you could say just delete it straight away or put it into junk?

[00:06:45] Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, you have, at the bottom of almost all emails, you’ll have an unsubscribed link. So at the bottom of your emails is an unsubscribed link. So you can just simply, and you can, and I would suggest that people are fairly vicious about how many emails they actually let themselves into getting and think about whether it’s actually something that’s worth their time, because yes, it is hard not to read the ones that you get.

[00:07:04] Stephen: But if you do want to read them, but you don’t wanna read them straight away, then you can set, you can set up a folder. So you could just do in, in, in Outlook, if you just do, if you just go to the inbox and do a right click, it’ll give you an option to set up a new folder, and then you can from, give an email there, there’s an option, set up a rule from the email and you can just send it to that inbox, to that, to that folder.

[00:07:21] Rachel: I’ve got one called Bacon, which is good spam. Um, and that was from, um, productivity ninja Graham Allcott. He, he suggested doing that. So stuff you think, oh, I’d really like to read that, but I’m not, can’t read it today. I’m not sure I ever will. You just put it into that Bacon box. And Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever really gone back into that.

[00:07:39] Rachel: Um, it is all these things that, oh, I’d like to keep, I don’t really wanna delete that, but I, I don’t want it in my Action box. Um, but that is, that is quite useful. So I, I think there’s something that we feel, if we delete stuff, it makes us feel anxious, just in case we need it again.

[00:07:55] Stephen: I, I, I mean, I should come clean and say I sometimes I’m really good at my emails and sometimes much, that’s good. This is not, you know, there’s no shits about this. I think you just need to, as a person, you just need to try out. So try deleting the stuff, see how it feels. Try not deleting it. See how it feels. And then, you know, take a little bit of time to reflect on how those, how those two processes have gone.

[00:08:13] Stephen: it’s Oliver Burkhmann I think he talks a lot about, you know, is information just being a river that you, you just sort of, you know, you just dip your cup in. It’s a bit like that with emails. Most, most things, um, people get back to you again, if it’s email. Opportunities tend to come again, it’s unlikely. It’s like, it’s like never to be repeated discounts, isn’t it? You know? Lo and behold,

[00:08:30] Rachel: It’s repeated.

[00:08:31] Stephen: Yeah. Lo and behold, it’s still available the next week. I think there’s very few, there’s very few opportunities that don’t come around in some way. Again, and if I think about my life things, I thought, you know, a never to be repeated opportunity. Actually, I was pretty glad I didn’t getting something else good came along.

[00:08:45] Stephen: And it’s more, it’s easy to say than it’s to do, but I think people can afford to be a bit more relaxed than they are about the emails they’re receiving and whether the opportunities will come again. It it generally, generally they do, and you know, most people are, you know, if you, if you miss an email, most people are quite nice about it.

[00:08:58] Rachel: And what about this feeling that we are rude if we are ghosting somebody? Because problem with email is anybody, if they have your email address, could send you a message. And there’s something about someone sending you a message, it’s sitting in inbox, particularly if it’s a personal message saying could we have a chat or a coffee or, or something like that?

[00:09:20] Rachel: They could have, you know, it might be someone you have never seen before, you’ve never heard of. There’s no particular reason for it. It, it’s their agenda, they, they want to. But you feel really guilty for saying no. And then you can feel really, um, resentful that that person has made you feel guilty, that you’ve got to say no to them because you don’t want to ghost them, ’cause that feels rude. So then almost the problem becomes your problem.

[00:09:46] Stephen: Oh gosh, there’s wheels within wheels there, isn’t there, Rachel? The, um, the psychiatrist to me is, the psychiatrist to me is, is, uh, fascinated.

[00:09:53] Rachel: Whatcha gonna?

[00:09:54] Stephen: fascinated, fascinated. I don’t think we’re respons. Okay. So, so I don’t think we’re responsible for what other people feel. That would be my, my one line response to that. And I dunno how that sit with people, but I think that we have, um, we have a responsibility to, to be our best selves and to, you know, conduct ourselves, you know, in a, in a professional way, in a way that sort of, um, is in line with our values. And hopefully those, I mean, I do think, you know, it’s important that those values respect other people.

[00:10:23] Stephen: However, I think once we have conduct. To ourselves in that way, then we can sit back and say, you know, I’ve done my best. And it’s, you are not responsible for how other people feel about what you’ve, what you’ve done. And I think unfortunately, you just, it’s, it’s, it would, wouldn’t it be lovely if we had time to, to reply to a email? We can’t.

[00:10:41] Stephen: I suppose one thing you could do is, um, I, I dunno what you say on your emails, but certainly I’m, I, I, I’m on very few email things, but Oliver Burkhmann I am on, and he says, I love getting emails. I do read them all, but I don’t have time to reply to them all.

[00:10:52] Stephen: So yeah, I think, I think unfortunately that, I mean, I, I, I guess that’s, that’s just with the convenience of email come to sound sites and that’s something we just, people need to get alongside and somehow be comfortable with.

[00:11:00] Rachel: Why is it though, that with email we feel more beholden to reply and to answer and to do it than if, you know, say if a patient just came up to you on the street and, and asked you for some advice, you’d be like, well, this is really inappropriate, I’m not gonna give it. Whereas that same patient, if they got your email address, could email you in and suddenly were like, I have a responsibility now because, because I have this message in my inbox. Do you think we do have a responsibility or not?

[00:11:25] Stephen: Well, it’s, I, I suppose it’s, it’s, I mean, it’s case by case, isn’t it? But I think probably I would, um, it is easier if you can have an email, which is, which is more difficult to guess. Um, and so people do need to think carefully about putting their emails out in the public domain if they don’t, don’t think they’re going to have time to reply.

[00:11:41] Stephen: So I suppose it’s, again, it’s about, it’s about personality factors and, and, and thinking ahead about how the best use to use your time is. Because ultimately if you, the time you spent replying to that particular person is time that you can’t give to somebody else. So it’s very much sort of opportunity cost.

[00:11:55] Stephen: Do you know, I’m not really sure why email people feel so behold. It, it, it, it sits in front of ’em every day, doesn’t it? Um, you can’t really sort of put it aside. There is this sort of sense, um, again, Cal Newport comes up with things, email makes things just easy enough. It is just about possible to reply to all your emails, isn’t it? If all your patients emailed you, it’s just about possible to do it.

[00:12:14] Rachel: Because I could, I should,

[00:12:15] Stephen: because I could. Yeah, exactly. ’cause I could, I should Cal Newport talks about how, why productivity is actually, you know, computers are amazing, again. All these things we can do with computers now, but productivity in the UK is still, has really struggled. And you know, and as a doctor, my productivity is really not what it should be, and there’s a problem with NHS productivity in general because it is just about possible for me to see all my patients and write up all my letters myself. And that’s what I’m asked to do. And so that’s what I do do.

[00:12:39] Stephen: So all the, all this sort of expensive condition time expertise is spent writing letters. So I see a patient takes me about 4 30, 5, 40 minutes and then it probably takes me about the same amount of time to write the letter. And the barrier to, of course the barrier to entry on email is very, very low as well, isn’t it? Anyone can send an email from anywhere in the world, takes ’em a second.

[00:12:56] Rachel: And also, I guess, because some really important things come to you via email, from, you know, people that you do need to reply to. And some of it is mission critical and, and job critical. But in exactly the same list is sitting that, you know, random requests for, you know, if you to send a hundred thousand pounds off to some, some country or what, you know, the, the spam stuff you’re, you’re trying to avoid. And then people get anxious and worried about, about things as as well. So I think it’s that everything lands in exactly the same place and it looks the same.

[00:13:28] Stephen: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a few things to tease out there. If you’re getting a lot of spam. Spam is one of those things that the tech companies have got quite good at preventing. So if you’re getting a lot of spam, I would revisit your spam filter.

[00:13:39] Stephen: Again, I mean, I suppose one of my messages from today is, is, is if email’s not working for you, it is a difficult thing to manage really, really well, and I’m not holding myself preparing virtue sometimes better than others. But it is possible to manage it. And I think that, you know, small wins. Can you make your email, can you think about the things that are bothering you about email? Can you make ’em a little bit better?

[00:13:56] Stephen: And, you know, and, and compound wins if you make it, I dunno, it’d be difficult to put a number on it, but let’s imagine you’ve got your email 5% better, gosh, over the cost of a year, five percent’s an awful lot, an awful lot of time that you are not, you know, that you can do something else or indeed nothing. You could use that time to do nothing.

[00:14:10] Rachel: And it’s about really small, small gains, isn’t it? I was in your article that you wrote, I was very struck by, what was it you said? If somebody in the trust of 10,000 people send out an email that takes everybody one minute to sort of read and process, even if it’s just to delete it, that takes up how much, how much time was it? Something like four and a half working weeks or something like that?

[00:14:33] Stephen: I know it’s extraordinary. I mean, on an individual level, I think this is right. If you waste, if you were to waste nine minutes a day, that’s 54 hours a year. So it all really adds up. So I think, um, I like to think I’m easy to work with, but one of the things I think it makes it slightly, slightly difficult to work with me occasionally is that I, I’m always saying to people, with every task you do in me, in, in, in your job, can you think, can we do this quicker? And by quicker it could mean, can we do it like two minutes quicker? ‘Cause all these things add up.

[00:14:57] Stephen: So starting that meeting on time, finish that meeting on time. And you know, if you’re having a meeting about patients, can, can we agree that we’re gonna talk to each, about each patient for five minutes rather than seven?

[00:15:06] Stephen: It sounds, it sounds difficult, sounds petty in a way, and it somehow sounds like not cricket, I always feel, but actually, if you can save that time, then these are the things that really make a difference to our jobs going smoothly.

[00:15:17] Rachel: I have read some evidence that actually if you have a time limited thing, you are actually more efficient, you get more done, and you are, you actually have a better conversation. So I, I think actually saying, right, we’ve got five minute conversation about this patient is gonna really focus someone’s mind than thinking, well, we’ve got, you know, 20 minutes to ramble on about it.

[00:15:33] Rachel: So the, if we go back to email, it strikes me that actually the, the issue we have around email is, is one of mindset. And if you can get the mindset right behind the whole thing, then it becomes much easier to, to deal with.

[00:15:46] Rachel: And the, the blockers that I see in myself is a, a fomo, you know, fear of missing, what if I miss out on something really interesting or a good deal or, or literally just a task that was, that was mission critical, you’ve got fomo.

[00:15:57] Rachel: You got the fear of being rude or upsetting someone or, or ghosting someone or not pleasing someone by not doing that task that they wanted me to do, even if I didn’t agree to do it in the first place. That’s one thing I think doctors in particular are very bad at that if the task lands in their inbox or even as a patient note,, or something like that, because you’ve been asked to do it, we suddenly take it on. Like we, it is our task because someone’s asked us rather than thinking, well, is this my task or not? We find it very difficult to go, well, this actually isn’t mine mine to take.

[00:16:28] Rachel: So that’s, that says fomo. There’s, is this task mine to take on? They’re saying, they’re saying no. Um, there’s a bit of a fear as well. I hear, you know, when people are on annual leave, their biggest thing about coming back to work is opening up their inbox. This fear of what might be in there,

[00:16:46] Stephen: Yeah, I went to a, a talk by a psychoanalyst once who described her having her job and how far hard she found it. And she said that she found, she thought email was like a crying baby in the corner of the room, which I, I I, beautiful, but also, you know, distressing. And I don’t doubt that was the case.

[00:17:00] Stephen: I mean, it can feel like that. And I think that was what my colleagues were like when they talked about email. I used to, well, it’s not even a joke. I used to say in our meetings, you, someone used to say, um, I’ve sent an email about it. And I’d be like, well, that means you haven’t done anything, doesn’t it?

[00:17:12] Rachel: You are right. I’ve sent an email, which means that I have taken the responsibility off me. I’ve taken the naughty monkey off me, and I’ve stuck it in an email and I’ve sent it to you.

[00:17:21] Stephen: Which can be the right thing to do, but also it is, it is, it, it, it can be quite stressful for the other person.

[00:17:26] Rachel: Yes, because you haven’t accepted that naughty monkey. So there’s all these naughty monkeys that you don’t know about that sat in your e email inbox that someone else has given to you or think they’ve given to you. And I think the, the main problem for me, Stephen, is that to give that naughty monkey back feels a little bit like a conflict situation. To say, actually this isn’t mine to take, can I just give you back this task? It’s, I’m not going to do it, yeah, that, that takes a lot of emotional work.

[00:17:54] Stephen: Yeah. Look, and I, and again, I’m not here to say these things are easy. Can you, but can you try it out? See, you know, so when you get, can you try these things out? You know, you’re not, you’re not committing yourself to a life of being nasty to people. If you send one email back and say like, I’m really sorry, but I don’t think this is my job.

[00:18:07] Stephen: Also, you could try not replying to an email for a bit and see what happens. I’m gonna give a trick of the trade away here, and I do say this to everyone, right, okay, schedule, send emails, it’ll change your life. Uh, most email packages allow you to reply to an email, but have it sent the next day, okay? So you can write the email and you can send, I dunno if you, I’ve sent you one or two emails, Rachel, I, you probably didn’t notice it all come at eight in the morning.

[00:18:28] Stephen: You send it a schedule send the next day. So the advance to that, right, is that you often, I think, oh no, I left that bit out. So you can return to the email so you have an opportunity to edit it, but also it pushes the work to the next day. And by that stage it might not even matter anymore. You can delete, you can delete the email or someone else may have picked it up.

[00:18:43] Stephen: And also you are not giving people the idea that you are there just sitting on the end of the email just replying and they, they can email you and they can get the answer immediately. They’re getting a sense that actually it’s gonna wait.

[00:18:51] Stephen: So what it allows you to do is to, it’s very hard when you get an email, especially if you sit in front of, it’s very hard not to reply to it. That’s, I think that’s a universal problem, right? But it, the problem is you’re trying to finish today’s work. You reply to it, you get the message, you reply to it, they reply back. The day’s work’s not done. If you reply to the email, but have it sent the next day, the day’s work is done and you’ve moved it to the next day.

[00:19:12] Rachel: I love that. I’d never thought of it like that. I, I, I have a delay sends on, on my email just yes, so I can go back and edit when I think, oh no, I should have put that in or whatever. But I’ve not thought about that. ’cause that’s, that’s what people wanna do. They wanna sort of get to the bottom of their to-do list. Although side note, I don’t think we ever do get to the bottom of our to-do list, but we like to feel that we’ve, we’ve done our work. But you are right. It just, I heard a statistic that every email generates an extra 1.7 emails. So it’s, it’s sort of ever expanding this email thing. So yeah, as soon as you reply, you are, you are creating more work for yourself, even if it feels like the task is done. So delaying it till the next day is genius.

[00:19:49] Stephen: mean, I suppose as well, you’re trying to be the be, be the change, aren’t you? So can you, you are not going to be able to sit down with a team as a doctor and say, look guys, you’ve gotta change the way you’re doing your email. I have seen the light. That’s not gonna happen. But can you demonstrate by your own behavior how best to use emails? So, for instance, I often send emails to people, uh, and I say, please do this task. and then I say, there is no need to cc me into further emails about this.

[00:20:09] Stephen: And then people don’t, because, uh, there’s a lot of people feel, I think, a bit anxious about the tasks they’re asked to do and, and they want, they want you to know about it as a, as a senior doctor, I mean I get that, but also you need to be able to say, I’m delegating this task to you, I trust you to do this task. You do not need to keep me constantly informed about it. It’s about, you know, because email, it’s, there is no barrier.

[00:20:28] Stephen: Again, let’s imagine email didn’t exist and you ask someone to do something, they’re not gonna knock on your door every five minutes. You know, I’ve sharpened the pencil now. I put the bit of paper in the pa in the past, they’re not gonna do that. But an email, it actually literally allows you to do that. And so you’ve, you’ve got to sort of teach people that actually it’s not, you know, I’m delegating this to you and you don’t need to tell me about it.

[00:20:45] Stephen: And also if you can think about how you, you think about how you are composing your email, can you, the tasks come to you, can you, with that email, send the task back to someone saying, please do these steps?

[00:20:55] Stephen: And can you be as, as prescriptive as possible and say, if this doesn’t work, do this. If this doesn’t work, do this. I’m now handing this over to you. Come back. Feel free to come back to me. But, you know, I don’t need to be kept abreast of this in, in fine detail.

[00:21:06] Stephen: So again, it’s, it’s, it’s about sort of thinking about, I think ahead, how can I use this to my best advantage rather than being sort of stuck in this cycle of, of constantly being updated by email and, and stuck in, stuck in the, the minutia when you wanna be thinking about tasks.

[00:21:20] Rachel: Yeah, so I think people cc people, don’t they, just to show that they’re doing it and then they forget to take them off cc. How do you know, though, that somebody has accepted the tasks that you’ve sent them? If you’ve been taken off the cc?

[00:21:30] Stephen: Well, I think it’s about having trust in your team, isn’t it? Well, I suppose it’s about having a good workflow, which is then outside the email. One of the other points in the article is don’t try to use email for everything. So it’s not, it’s a message. It’s a, it’s a, what is it? Indiscriminate message system, asynchronous, indiscriminate message system where everything comes into the same inbox. It’s not a to-do list. a calendar, a later list, it’s just messages coming in. And if you are using it for those other things, you need to, I would, you know, then you need to think about your digital fluency and whether you can be using other apps that do it better.

[00:22:01] Rachel: Yeah, I totally agree. Don’t use email as your to-do list. And I was, I’m just thinking what you were saying about, you know, giving a task to, to a colleague. If you’re really worried about making sure they’ve actually received it or whatever, then you could have a conversation with a team saying, when I send you that task, just send me know about going got it, thanks. And then once you know they’ve got it, then you don’t need to be cc’d on, on anything else and, and, and take you off and be very explicit about that.

[00:22:25] Rachel: I, I do, when I’m putting people in contact with each other, I say, please take me off, you know, no need to cc me into any of the, to any of your emails. You know, you guys, you guys go through it. I don’t need to be copied into your, any future correspondence between you and, and things like that. And that just gives people permission, doesn’t it, not to, not to do that. But I think sometimes people just unclear and they don’t know what you want and what you don’t want. So again, it’s being

[00:22:48] Stephen: Yeah. So, so yeah, they, they don’t need to feel, don’t feel, need to feel polite. I think, you know, I think as, as, um, you often say to your podcast, I mean, clarity is kindness, isn’t it? So if you just literally clear is kind. Yeah. So if you can, if you can, um, just say to people, you don’t need to, I’ve, I’ve done my bit here, i’m gonna, you know, I don’t think you can, I think you can be honest and say, I haven’t got time to be, continue to be in this. I hope that sounds okay.

[00:23:07] Stephen: And people are normally fine with these things. People are so wrapped up. I mean, you know, people are so wrapped up in their own lives that they don’t care.

[00:23:12] Rachel: I think one of the problems that I’ve certainly had is, is you want to be polite on email, and then so when someone sends you something, you don’t need to, you don’t need to reply, but you feel it’s rude not to reply. So you end up going, oh, thanks so much, that’s great. Brilliant. And then have a nice day, then they reply going, you too. And it’s just like, oh.

[00:23:31] Rachel: So me and my colleagues, we started to put NNTR at the end of a message. No need to reply. It’s just like, here’s information, no need to reply. And that, that’s been quite helpful. So we know that no one is gonna think you are, um, rude if you are, if you’re not replying.

[00:23:44] Rachel: But emails are bad for tone of voice, aren’t they? Communicating anything, anything more emotional? What, what advice would you have for people that are, are in this sort of a conversation via email that they need to convey something a little more, more complex and just sort of information? Would you still keep on email or would you do something different?

[00:24:03] Stephen: Well, I suppose you could always call them, couldn’t you? Um, I, I think people got a little bit better. I mean, the emoji, the gring face emoji to show, I mean, I like, I like, you know, liberal use of exclamation marks and the gring face emoji. And again, schedule send. If you, if you get, uh, if you start to worry that your tone is wrong, then you can, you can always return to it if you do a schedule send, whereas if you send off heat in the moment.

[00:24:23] Stephen: I have got in trouble in my life being cross and tired at the end of the day and sending a cross and tired email and then it’s taken me some days in case it’s some days and a bit of groveling to unwind. And, um, so you’ve just got to be, I mean, it’s about managing yourself and understanding what you like, is you a person And part of that is about under, you know, being able to, to access your own mental states, which, you know, so, you know, it, it, it’s, it’s, it sounds like it’s easy, but noticing that you are tired and emotional and getting send across email is not something that comes, easily to us. It’s not something you teach at medical school, for instance. and you have to kind of have to learn it the hard way.

[00:24:55] Stephen: Um, but emojis which are available on all computers are quite, are quite good for that. And like I say, you can always, and you can always say something like, do you know what I’m really worried about how this is coming across in the email, you can say that I’m really worried about how that’s coming across, and if this is sitting right with you, let’s, let’s arrange to talk about it and we just, just acknowledge the difficulty of the email.

[00:25:11] Rachel: Just very quickly, how do you do schedule send?

[00:25:14] Stephen: if we’re talking about Microsoft packages, there’s the desktop app, and then there’s the browser based version. So most people with NHS Mail will have the option between the two. And it’s diff it’s different between doing the two, but essentially, um, normally near the send button, there’s little, little dropdown box and it allows you to set, to schedule, send it. I’m more than happy to do a little video to show how that’s done.

[00:25:33] Rachel: well, we’ll tell you what. If people want little videos on these things, let us know. Email you, uh, send more email, but this is totally fine. Email hello@youarenotafrog.com to ask for a video. And by the way, just side note, We, I do absolutely love hearing from listeners because when you’re doing something like a podcast, you don’t see people face to face. And the only way I’ve got from hearing from people is to email. So please don’t think you shouldn’t be emailing us in.

[00:25:54] Rachel: But Stephen, I just wanna go on to talk about this. To-do list email is a to-do list. ’cause I think most of us are, are guilty of, of doing that, even if we have other to-do lists. And, we’ve worked very hard in our organization to get tasks off email. And so now we, we use a project management system so we can communicate via that. And it has honestly been a game changer. So very few tasks from my team come to me via email. They all come through, we, we use Asana.

[00:26:22] Rachel: How does that work in healthcare? Because lots of people say, oh, we can’t use other project management systems. We can’t use other things. People are very worried about, obviously data protection. And when it comes to patients, obviously tasks need to be kept in a very secure environment. But what would your advice be about how to marry emails up with a, with a to-do list, so your to-do list isn’t sitting in your inbox?

[00:26:45] Stephen: Well, look, we, we are not in, I mean, you know, we, the packages we are using for email are not in our zone of power. So we just have, I mean, to a degree, we, you run a, a relatively, you know, compared to the NHSA modest organization um, so you have the ability to, to say, actually email’s not working. So I suppose what you’re doing with Asana is you are having a number of projects and then the messages are connected to those projects rather than all coming into the same place. You can come to work in the morning and you can say, you can go to Asana and you can say, these are the jobs and I’m gonna work on that one.

[00:27:12] Stephen: So you are dictating your day, your day schedule. From that point of view, you’re not coming to your inbox and think you are inbox and think, and that’s dictating your day’s schedule.

[00:27:19] Stephen: In healthcare. This, I no doubt there are some enlightened places out there, but it’s everywhere I’ve worked. The note system doesn’t support that sort of thing. ‘Cause I mean, in a way, each patient is a separate project and the emails, we could have messages attached to each patient. So every every clinical episode is a project. Our note systems don’t really allow us to do that. They’re essentially based on paper notes and everything is being sort of piled on top. They don’t, they’re not really, they don’t really support productivity. And then email, of course, sits on top of that as well. None of the two of them sits together. We have to take, it’s not like, in my case, I don’t, I, I doubt it’s anywhere. It’s not like if you send an email about a patient that automatically attaches itself to their notes. You have to do it separately.

[00:27:56] Stephen: We, we’ve got to know the situation. I mean, I’m old enough to to remember paper notes, which were a pain. And again, let’s not forget how great electronic notes are. Isn’t it amazing that you just go into a computer and there the notes are, rather than having to call it up from a, and someone rushes over with a, with a, with a falling apart packet of notes that you have to sort of try and put together.

[00:28:13] Stephen: But it did mean that you could go straight to the doctor’s bits, and that’s the bit I’m interested in. Whereas now I often have to wade through multiple notes about how many sandwiches a person had that day to get to the bit that’s really important.

[00:28:25] Stephen: Anyway, if’s sort of about trying to be intentional about your work. if you, if you decide that, you know, this is something, something needs to be done about it, can you as it, what can you change as an individual? And you can probably, you can probably start, so rather than checking your emails, you can start to process your emails and then, which is what my article talks about, you, you, you get an email. What is the task in this email? And then from that point on, you then move the email into a separate folder and make a note.

[00:28:47] Stephen: So let’s imagine it was something like, Stephen, can you fill in this, can you fill in this prescription? I read the email, I either do it on the spot, so this is very sort of Dave Allen stuff, can I do it on the spot or do I put it as a, do I put it as a do this? So what I might do, someone gets an email, can you, you know, let’s call the patient Dave Smith. Can you write an FP 10 for Dave Smith? Okay, can I do it now? No. Put it in the, I’ll put it, I’ll put the, the job on my to-do list and then I’ll put it in the Dave Smith folder, and then, then it’s not sitting on my inbox anymore.

[00:29:13] Rachel: But I think the key thing is noticing what the email is. Is it just for your information only or does it have a task in it? If it’s got a task in it, you process that task either, yeah, like you said, by doing it or putting it on your to-do list somewhere.

[00:29:29] Rachel: if people are interested in this, uh, we had a really good, uh, interview with, uh, Graham Allcott, the productivity .Ninja who talks very nicely about having a, a second brain. So just your, your to-do list is basically your second brain.

[00:29:41] Rachel: And I think he thinks that basically it doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as it’s consistent. I think that that’s the thing, because it’s really, really stress inducing when you’ve got multiple tasks, but in different places. You’ve got some in an email, some to do with, some on some paper, some over here. Whereas if you just know that there’s one place where you have, have, keep kept the bulk of it.

[00:30:02] Rachel: Now actually, I, I have a, a paper thing and I also have have Asana, and between those two, that seems to work pretty well, but that’s when I get really stressed is when I don’t quite know where my tasks are and what I need to do.

[00:30:14] Stephen: So he talks about having, trying to reduce the number of channels of information coming into you. So, and again, it’s about, this is about, I suppose, making a decision yourself, what works for you, being okay with occasionally other people feeling or being a bit awkward and then sticking to it. So if you’ve got a place where you are getting, you know, if you are, as it were, your bigger inbox, your job’s in inboxes, WhatsApp messages, emails, letters, phone calls, you know, then you are, then that’s just gonna make your life more difficult.

[00:30:41] Stephen: So probably, do you need people to contact you on WhatsApp as well as email? So I actually like email so I, I discourage people from WhatsApp and me about stuff. ’cause then you’ve got two things to keep on top of. So can you, can you have one channel where these jobs come in? And can you then sort of like be quite focused on how you, on how you manage the tasks that are coming in that way.

[00:31:01] Rachel: How many times do you check your email every day?

[00:31:03] Stephen: I mean, load loads, loads, loads. if I’ve got something really important to do. So there is, I forget where I read it, but you know, if you come in and you check your email, you are coming into work and it’s like you’re doing someone else’s to-do list, not your own.

[00:31:17] Stephen: So I would probably, I mean, look, think about my day. I, I, I would probably come in and just briefly check the email during the day. I mean, unfortunately I don’t get as many emails as I used to, and I think that is because I have trained people not to, I don’t get that many, you know, I’m not, I’m not on any, it’s, um, I’m not on any marketing lists. I’ve got various rules set up to, to move away the emails, which, um, I don’t consider to be particularly important. Um, and people don’t cc email that much. I don’t find that I’m absolutely overwhelmed with emails. So I do check it very briefly, first thing in the morning, and then I would try to avoid and sort of check it a little bit around lunchtime process it, I should say, process it, process it a little bit around lunchtime, and then in the afternoon.

[00:31:56] Stephen: I have found that with, with the process I got set up with email that it, it, it no longer overwhelms you like it used to, but I think if people, I mean the article sort of sets out a way of thinking about this, you know, sort of the, the, the, as it were, the email hygiene initially, and then a way to continue about with it, which is, um, which is more sustainable.

[00:32:13] Stephen: Um, so I think if, if I was an absolute sort of guru and just, and sort of lying about what I do, I would say, well, Rachel, I get up in the morning and after I finished my, you know, yoga and

[00:32:22] Rachel: deep work time

[00:32:23] Stephen: Yeah, after I finished yoga and journaling, you know, um, I would, I, you know, then I don’t check my email for the first, you know, sort of, I start work at nine, you know, after putting my, my, my face in a bowl of cold water for 10 seconds, i, I then don’t check my email for two hours because I’ve already decided the day before what tasks I’m going to do. Um, then I check my emails for four, you know, I process my emails for, for 30 minutes at 11 o’clock. And then I would, I would process ’em again at sort of three in the afternoon for 45 minutes and then I’m done.

[00:32:50] Stephen: So I think that’s what the guru would say. None of us have really like that. So I think you just, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a constant work in progress. But if you have things that you need to do, don’t check your email first. Especially, and it’s like, know thyself. if you’ve read the articles, you’ve read the books, you listened to the podcast, but you still find it difficult, just know what you’re like and just, and just think, well, do you know what? Email’s always gonna be difficult for me, but can I make it a bit better? I know that if I check my email first thing in the morning, then I, that’s it. Down a rabbit hole for the next two hours.

[00:33:16] Stephen: Graham, I think one of Graham Allcott’s great insights is, is about your managing attention. So if you really need to get something done, your, probably your best time to do it is between, um, you know, hub state and, and 11 in the morning, isn’t it? Don’t spend that time, you know, spending, you know, on the phone to IT or, or the emails about, or emails about your printer or something. Spend it doing the work time. Okay. And, and you do need to find time.

[00:33:40] Stephen: Bill Gates and Warren Buffett like to say, busy is the new stupid, which is my current phrase that I like. I wheel a house in it to annoy people, but they’re right. If you’re really, really busy all the time, you will not find the time to think about stuff that you need to change. And if you spend your time always doing the urgent stuff, you know, you never get the time to plan. And if you spend your time doing this stuff, it is, it’s important or not urgent, then actually the urgent stuff will reduce because eventually because you have taken, because, because you’ve already sorted it out.

[00:34:06] Rachel: And so what you are talking about Stephen is Deep Work and Cal Newport who wrote the book, uh, well that email wrote this amazing book, deep Work. And I think in, in medicine we hardly get any time for deep work or we hardly give ourselves any time for deep work. And that has been the biggest game changer for me. It’s not taking my email is working on the important projects, doing the deep work first thing in the morning when, when I can. And obviously the caveat that we know people have clinics and they’re in surgery and they’ve got ward rounds and stuff, but when, when you can do your deep work first.

[00:34:37] Rachel: And that was absolute gem what you said, you know, you might have planned the night before you sit down, you look, what have I got? What have I got tomorrow? How am I gonna schedule my day? What are the three things I need to get done and when am I gonna do those? And if possible, you can just sit down and start off on those, that deep project that you wanted to do that is in your not urgent but important box. But if you check your email, you just get sucked into it, like you said, everybody else’s tasks.

[00:35:01] Rachel: The other mistake I see people making is, and I do this all the time, you check your email in between other things or I used to check it in between patients when, why on earth did I do that? Because I was already running late. So, you know, if you check your emails and something really important’s there that you get distracted by, but you haven’t got time to deal with it or answer it ’cause you’re in the middle of a surgery.

[00:35:23] Rachel: So we’re constantly checking our emails and getting the, the stress of some of the tasks that are coming in the emails, but we can’t process it at that point. So we’re adding to the task and we’re adding basically to the cognitive load all day. So I think only checking emails when you actually have a chance to process them, to be able to put them on a to-do list or actually action some of the things makes sense to me.

[00:35:43] Stephen: I think so. You’ve, I mean, again, to mildly challenge you, Rachel, I think you’ve talked a lot about urgent stuff coming through emails. And certainly that’s possible, my experience is it’s, it’s 99% not urgent emails, if not more. And if someone sends you something really urgent life or death on an email, I think there’s probably, that probably needs, the organization did it probably needs, they probably need to think about where that’s what, what that’s all about. Because there should be well, potentially, I mean, I, I, you know, obviously there’s lots of different ways of doing things, but potentially there should be a duty person sending in front of that email inbox and looking at it rather than sending it to someone who may or may not read it that day.

[00:36:18] Stephen: So I think, you know, that’s, that’s, you know, that’s about, that’s about managing the workflow there. That’s a, like you say, a system issue. So if that is a problem, bring it up at the next, the next business meeting and say, I’m getting these emails that seem to be really important, but I’m just, I can’t undertake, I can’t undertake to answer them.

[00:36:35] Rachel: I mean I think that’s a really concrete action step that our listeners could take, that if you are checking your emails all the time because you are really worried that something urgents gonna be in there, then what is the step that you need to take to make sure your team and everyone else know that that is absolutely the wrong way to contact you in an, in an emergency? You know, phone, phone, text message. My family know they need to text me if there’s a, there’s a problem. ’cause that’s the one thing that pings on my phone, nothing else does.

[00:37:03] Stephen: absolutely. So, and, and it’s good, the problem with email, which is that you are getting in stuff about, you know, milks on a, milks on a discount at Tesco this week, plus the fact that, you know, so and so, this, this really, really this urgent thing is going to happen. It’s, it’s about you, you, you do have the ability to, I guess through your, through an example or through your concrete actions to train people not to do that or to think can there be a better way of doing this?

[00:37:24] Stephen: We are, we are working with colleagues who really feel, and I’ve, if people to email ’em say that you just don’t get it and you know, I, I, I, maybe I don’t, maybe I don’t get people’s workplace, but it is general normally to, you can change things a little bit and from little changes can come quite big changes in culture. So, and we gotta start somewhere.

[00:37:41] Rachel: And Stephen, can I just ask you, because people can get very obsessed with getting inbox to zero and um, and end up spending more time managing their emails and filing emails than they do actually doing the work. And I’ve sort of got over that by just having one archive folder that anything that I’ve read that I wanna keep just goes into archives so then I can search it. And that works really, really well for me.

[00:38:00] Rachel: But when I’ve spoken to, to doctors, they are concerned about what to do with the. Patient related emails versus the general job related emails. So you, as a practicing clinician, how, how do you deal with that, the patient stuff coming into the same inbox as as everything else? Do you have a specific system for the patient?

[00:38:19] Stephen: Yeah, so just, just to talk about in inbox zero for a bit. The, the guy who originally came up with Inbox Zero has sort of since sort of withdrawn, you know, sort of made a retreat from it. I think it is difficult to do that, but just so your listeners know, the idea is that you don’t have anything, you, an email comes into inbox, you deal with it in various ways. Um, and if you look at my article as a flow chart about what to do. You do it various ways, so you have nothing in your inbox.

[00:38:39] Stephen: And that can become a, the criticism of that just becomes another thing to beat yourself up about, oh no, I’m not inbox zero. Again, you, you need to be compassionate to yourself, and these are all sort of, you know, they’re ideals. It’s not a bad idea. But if you don’t manage it, like, don’t worry about it too much.

[00:38:54] Stephen: In terms of what I do as a clinician, so I, there is no right way to organize your folders with your emails. You need to be able, really, the the right way to do it is to allow you to find the emails that you need to find reasonably quickly. So I personally don’t find that the search function works well enough to allow me to find what I need. Because it might, you know, some people don’t put patient names on emails and they just put numbers. Other people, I sometimes I have to remember who sent me the email, all that sort of thing.

[00:39:20] Stephen: Um, so actually every single patient gets their own folder, which is a little bit unwieldy. I mean, I’ve got about 150 folders to the left hand side of my screen. But it does mean whenever I, you know, I need to find out about a patient, especially if it’s someone that I haven’t thought about for quite some time, then all the relevant emails are in the folder to the left hand side of my screen. So that’s what I do.

[00:39:38] Rachel: So it sounds like you, you separate anything that’s sort of clinical about patients goes into a very specific separate folder. It doesn’t just sit with a mele of, of everything

[00:39:45] Stephen: Yeah. So everyone gets their own, every single patient gets their own folder. I wouldn’t, I mean, I don’t think that would work for a GP

[00:39:50] Rachel: Yeah. Possibly not for a gp, but they could have a, a clinical folder that they put everything about patient that’s easier to search that clinical folder, then it is to search an entire archive of every single inbox you’ve got, email, you’ve got from, you know, yeah, like you said, Tesco’s and us and ev, everything

[00:40:04] Stephen: and I’ve got about 200 patients assigned to me. So it’s again, just about possible to do, to do that, that that works for me. It doesn’t necessarily work for everybody.

[00:40:11] Rachel: But you’ll find your own folders. And that’s exactly what I’ve done. I found the folders that I need. Most stuff goes into archive. I’ve got a folder for finance I can find quickly. There’s a people, a Confirmation Safe place thing so if there’s a ticket or a something I need to know, or a Zoom link I need quickly, I can go into that one.

[00:40:27] Rachel: Um, and I’ve got a, I’ve actually got two action folders. I’ve got urgent action for today, so that’s the one I know needs to be totally cleared. And there’s an action action folder as well. Most of those actions have gone on to Asana, but that’s just for stuff that I know I need to just keep an eye on

[00:40:42] Stephen: so I have, I mean, so in terms of the more mundane stuff, I’ve got a, uh, the inbox, an action folder, and a and awaiting reply folder. And then I have a sort of general archive folder as well. So that would be my sort of home stuff.

[00:40:54] Stephen: I think you could, I mean, I think you could argue that my action folder is a bit like a do list, and I think Guilty is charged. I mean, you can’t, you know, it’s, it’s really, it’s really hard to keep the two separate, but there is, ’cause some jobs are sufficiently small that they don’t quite fit in a to-do list. But, you know, it’s a work in progress, isn’t it?

[00:41:08] Rachel: And also if the action is on an email, and it’s a, it’s, the action is a reply that needs doing it. It feels like duplicating work to go right. I need to put on Asana. I need to email back that person when it could just go into my email, them back folder type

[00:41:22] Stephen: Well, exactly, exactly. So I mean, I went through a stage of, of, um, thinking I wouldn’t sort of, uh, read my emails at all in the morning. And then I actually realized that actually a lot of my work was replying to emails. So that didn’t really work.

[00:41:32] Rachel: The message I’m getting from you, Stephen, is sort of good enough and done is better than trying to go for a perfect system and failing.

[00:41:39] Stephen: Yeah. So I, I, um, around the, so the time that I started listening to your podcast, actually, Rachel, I, I, I started listening to sort of productivity gurus on YouTube, and I thought, this is amazing. You know, these guys, you know, they, they, they, they’re learning piano, they’re learning Spanish, and that’s just before 11 in the morning. And then I tried to do it, and I, I just thought, yes, this is just, actually, this is just not possible. And then I realized actually that I think they’re sort of selling a dream rather than something they can actually do themselves. And then I just came to the idea that actually it’s more about just, Can you get your life a bit organized? But can you also forgive yourself if you can’t quite manage to be perfect.

[00:42:10] Rachel: That’s the stuff that’s just productivity porn, isn’t it? You know, the fact that I’ve got nothing left on my to-do list, it’s never, it’s never gonna happen. For me, it’s all about how do I feel? Do I feel that I know what’s on my to-do list? Do I feel that all my tasks are in places that I know that they are? Do I know what’s on my plate? Because if you know what’s on your plate, you can deal with it.

[00:42:31] Rachel: That when, when I talk to people, um, in healthcare who are really overwhelmed and I know when I felt overwhelmed myself, it’s when I haven’t really known exactly what, I’ve known there’s a lot on my plate, but I haven’t just detailed it out. And sometimes just getting it down is enough to stop the overwhelm, ’cause then you can have a plan about, well, what am I gonna do? What I’m gonna delegate, what I’m gonna drop?

[00:42:50] Rachel: But listen, Stephen, we ask this to everybody is, you know, what would be your top three tips for someone who’s just feeling like they’re, they’re drowning an email and it just feels like one of their main issues at work?

[00:43:01] Stephen: Um, when it, when it comes to email, I think, um, well, my overall message is, um, organization sets you free. I don’t know this, I still sort of get this sort of, I, maybe it’s just me, but I just have this sense of somehow, you know, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not quite, you know, it’s, it’s not quite playing the game if you’re really organized. But actually, if you are organized and you, and you try to align yourself with that, you will make time and it will make your lives easier. And so, and that then that will allow you to do other things or indeed, nothing at all.

[00:43:24] Stephen: With email, I think, my tip is that you more are more in control of it than you think, and that if you, if you spend a little bit of time thinking about, can I do this better, you’ll be able to make small gains.

[00:43:34] Stephen: My third tip, well, I think it’s just, I think it’s just be kind to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Others, it’s like in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, be, be excellent to each other. But what I’m trying to say is, you, this is really difficult. I think we are not taught about, you know, we, we, we don’t get training about it often. Our colleagues don’t support us in it, and I don’t, not nastily, but they’re try, they’re struggling as well. You need to, um, you need to be kind to yourself and, and again, to concentrate small wins rather than the sense that you need to completely, the only thing that counts as a completely organization,

[00:44:01] Rachel: Thank you. Those are, those are truly excellent tips. Um, as you were saying that the, the organization sets you free, my mind immediately went to Oh, yeah. But some of us find it very difficult to get organized, Stephen. Yeah. Particularly those of us who have ADHD. But then I thought, actually I totally agree with you. ‘Cause actually, if, if you have difficulty with executive functioning like ADHD, like I have, like many, many doctors have and other people in healthcare, organization is even more important for you.

[00:44:29] Rachel: And there are lots of really good project managers who have ADHD and the reason they got, they’re good project managers is ’cause they know the organization doesn’t come naturally to them. So they have to have a system. So I think when you, you do have something like ADHD, having a system like this becomes much, much more important and, and then lets you operate well in the world. And that’s what I found.

[00:44:49] Rachel: I used to think I was a very organized person until my admin team said, no, Rachel, you’re really not. But it was because I had so many lists and systems because it didn’t come easily to you. And honestly, putting these things in, in place for myself is, has really, really set me free. So don’t say, don’t think just because you’re neurodivergent, it doesn’t mean you can’t do this. Actually, you need to do this even more.

[00:45:12] Rachel: I think I let things get on top of me because I hadn’t found the systems that worked, and actually I’ve seen getting the systems that work as part, as part of the work. You know, getting yourself organized, working out how you manage information is actually part of your role.

[00:45:24] Stephen: Yeah. So you can, you can, there’s no shame in going up to someone and saying, Hey, um, you seem to be, you seem to be organized, and you always seem to go home on time. What’s that about? How are you managing that? And then, you know, then you can, then you can, you can listen and you think, oh, that’s rubbish and I’ll do it. Or you think, oh, do you know what, um, or, you know, listen to this podcast. You know that, that’s Stephen Ginn bloke. It wasn’t all, it wasn’t all gold, but I like that idea. that’s, that’s that’s that’s what it is. It’s about a constant.

[00:45:47] Rachel: Of notes here that I’m gonna be

[00:45:48] Rachel: doing.

[00:45:49] Stephen: constant, process. Constant process of, of iterative improvements.

[00:45:53] Rachel: The other thing I’ve take away from my chat is just because it’s in your inbox doesn’t mean it’s yours. You know, you, you have a choice and you have the control. And I think, I think that’s a, a mindset shift we all need to have about anything. Just ’cause someone’s asked you to do it doesn’t mean you have to do, you have to do it.

[00:46:07] Rachel: But also thing about actually communicating with your team about the rules around how you do emails as a team. You know, what are the expectations? Because if you know that there’s not an expectation to reply immediately and, and, and you won’t be replying immediately, you’ll be replying next day. I’m definitely gonna try that sending at 8:00 AM the next day, then, then everyone feels permission to do that. And it, it helps everybody. So

[00:46:28] Stephen: an electric shock connected to anyone who does reply all as well. That should be.

[00:46:32] Rachel: I’d certainly be motivating, wouldn’t

[00:46:34] Stephen: Yeah. And, um, the other thing is, my dream would be, and I’m nowhere near doing this, is that, that, ’cause what happens is people certainly in senior positions tend to get a lot of emails they need to pass on. Now, ideally, they would click them all and send them one email a week, but they just, they just, you know, send them out every time. So you can, as a team, if it’s ever possible, as a team, think, well, you know, what’s this working for us?

[00:46:53] Stephen: I have to say that we, you know, in my workplace, we, we, we don’t sit around and, and dutifully talk about our email culture, but I think it’s ’cause it’s, it’s not too bad where I am. But I think, you know, again, it’s about taking power. Can you think about how it might be done better? And you can just ask, can’t you, you can say, I’ve got this problem. Can anyone help? And what’s the worst thing that’s gonna happen? You know, no one’s gonna take notice of you. Is that bad?

[00:47:13] Rachel: but the only, why don’t we just stick it in as an AOB at the end of the meeting, right? Anyone got any good tips for how we’re doing our emails right now, or how we’re communicating?

[00:47:20] Rachel: Um, one thing I did want to mention, um, is that I have about 40 or 50 different signatures to just save me saying the same thing over and over again. And those signatures are quite good to be able to put some, say no stuff to as well. So you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you wanna give that task back or, or not take it on.

[00:47:35] Stephen: I don’t do that. That sounds like a brilliant idea, but I don’t do that for, for no, for no reason. Other, I, other than I haven’t quite got round to it. Um, no, I, I do have sort of form emails. I use Notion a lot, which is a note taking app,

[00:47:45] Rachel: So do you Cut, and paste from notion into, into your emails a

[00:47:48] Stephen: cut and paste from Notion. I mean obviously I do it differently. You, so I don’t have a lot of unsolicited emails and I guess you probably get quite a few.

[00:47:54] Rachel: Well, I guess it’s about standard replies. I think a lot of people are just writing the same reply over and over again. How can you get a system where you are just giving, you know, if it’s the same reply you’re giving to people, just even, even to my team, actually. ‘Cause I, I, I love getting emails, you know, from, from people outside my team. I like, like Amy emails from my team, but I do have standard replies I even used to my team, which is great. Please schedule or great, please do this.

[00:48:16] Stephen: Some people are using AI to reply to emails these days? I haven’t quite got that far. That’s a whole different discussion, but I haven’t quite got that far. So it’s about, I mean, it’s what the, what you’re talking about is what the productivity guru is called, isn’t it? Reducing variation.

[00:48:27] Rachel: Well, Stephen, thank you so much. It’s been so good having you on really loads and loads of gold in there, lots of little tips and things. Um, what we’ll do is we will post a link to your article, uh, have a look at the article. I really, really recommend it. It’s a quick read, but there’s so much in that article as well, and I It’s something that we moan about a lot, but we don’t take control of and actually do anything about. And we spend so much time looking at emails and processing emails.

[00:48:53] Rachel: And I think I, for me, I’m gonna take, take that away rather than checking emails, i’m gonna think of myself as, I’m just gonna process some emails that, that’s a bit of a mindset shift as

[00:49:02] Stephen: Yeah. So it’s a task. It’s a task like any other, which you need to give. We haven’t talked about it now, but um, we, uh, you need to put time. The idea that you, you are just gonna do it amongst other things is, you know, you’ve got to give it time.

[00:49:12] Rachel: So thank you for coming on. We’ll put the link in there and there, there’s, um, contact details for you in, in that article as well. and will, you know, once you’ve worked out more tips on how to do this, will you come back and share them with us?

[00:49:23] Stephen: be, great. Pleasure Rachel. Well thank you for having me on this time.

[00:49:27] Rachel: Thanks for listening. Don’t forget, you can get extra bonus episodes and audio courses along with unlimited access to our library of videos and CPD workbooks by joining FrogXtra and FrogXtra Gold, our memberships to help busy professionals like you beat burnout and work happier. Find out more at youarenotafrog.com/members.