No one emails the fire brigade
Five ways to minimise the time spent in your inbox
This concept changed my working life.
I slip sometimes, but I’m going back into it, full throttle.
In the book The Four Hour Work Week, the author Tim Ferriss proposed a way to handle email overwhelm. I’ve adapted it slightly and want to share it with you today.
The concept is simple, and was summed up by a former employee of mine. No one emails the fire brigade. If something is truly urgent, people find a way to contact you.
The problem in the modern way of working is that there is no discrimination between what is important and unimportant, and what is or isn’t urgent. Emails are rarely self-identified as important or urgent, and as such the spam from a mailing list you accidentally signed up for sits alongside something that you actually need to know right now.
Here’s the five steps that I use to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Setting the scene for a different way of working
I have a signature and auto responder (out of office) for all of my inboxes, that reads as follows:
Important – Please Read
Due to the nature of my role, I am often travelling for business or out of the office. In addition, I prefer to deal with emails when at a computer so that I can give them the attention that they deserve, reply properly, and not miss anything important. Therefore, please do not expect an urgent response to emails, as response times may be counted in days or even weeks, depending on availability. Please also accept my apologies for any emails sent outside of normal UK office hours.
If something is truly urgent and can’t wait, please contact my assistant Ella on [email]. Ella works Monday to Thursday during normal office hours. If Ella is unavailable, you can contact the team on [phone number] or [email]. They will make sure that an urgent message gets to me.
Many thanks in advance for your understanding.
By setting this up for both my signature and auto responder, I set the scene for both inbound and outbound emails. I make it clear that I won’t entertain back and forth ‘instant messages’ via email, nor will I disrupt my meeting to see an email about the latest promotional offer from someone. It allows me to focus on batch clearing of my inbox as and when the time is right.
The important thing to do when implementing this is to give a way for important emails to get to you. I’m fortunate to have a team, many do not. So if that’s the case, find a way to add some friction but in any event, make sure you are contactable.
Perhaps you can offer a phone number for people to talk to you if something is urgent? Or, ask them to text you? People these days are incredibly reluctant to pick up the phone, unless it’s a 999 call!
Create a ‘truly urgent’ email address and contact mechanism
Some of the things I do really requires urgent attention.
In a normal day to day scenario, this would be press requests for comment. The deadlines are incredibly tight, and the autoresponder will likely be ignored.
I’ve set up a special email address for these, that is not used for anything else. Those journalists can get my immediate attention, at the click of a ‘send’ button.
My team may well also have urgent matters that need addressing ASAP. They of course have my mobile number.
For the (slight) additional hoops I make them jump through, I give a counter-offer of value. If they contact me on my mobile, I answer. There’s no hiding away from calls, and if a call is missed, I return it as soon as I can. It’s down to them to not take the piss!
Set up filters on your email
My main Gmail inbox in particular would die under the weight of spam emails if there were no filters. Google does a good job on the most blatant examples, but what Google classes as spam and what I class as spam are two completely different things.
I have no wish to know that you’re running a Black Friday deal, even though I may have ticked the box 10 years ago!
I used to use a tool called unroll.me until our wonderfully ridiculous GDPR regulations stopped it from being available in the UK.
So now, I have a system of filters which helps redirect emails to their rightful place!
I have set up a filter to capture words such as “unsubscribe” and other similar words that indicate that it is part of a mailing list, so that they skip my inbox, are marked as read, and get archived.
Here’s the list I use. It’s not perfect, but it works 99% of the time:
(unsubscribe OR "view in browser" OR "If you do not wish to receive emails from" OR "If you would prefer not to receive commercial" OR "you no longer wish to receive" OR "view as a web page" OR "YOU ARE SUBSCRIBED" OR "to stop receiving emails" OR "view online" OR "update your preferences")
This still needs a manual check whenever I batch check my emails, but I know that these are low priority and likely don’t need responses - instead, I can just cast my eye over them to ensure that all is good and that I haven’t won the National Lottery.
I’ve also done similar for order confirmation emails, delivery notifications, and so on. And of course my own auto responses! Here’s a sample of these:
Matches: from:(yourdelivery@dpd.co.uk) your parcel has been delivered
Do this: Skip Inbox, Mark as read, Apply label "Delivery confirmations"
Matches: from:(shipment-tracking@amazon.co.uk)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Mark as read, Apply label "Delivery confirmations"
Matches: from:(order-update@amazon.co.uk)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Mark as read, Apply label "Delivery confirmations"
Matches: accepted AND "filename:invite.ics" has:attachment
Do this: Skip Inbox, Mark as read, Apply label "Meeting Acceptances"
Matches: from:(carl@carlreader.com) subject:(**Important note regarding email turnaround times**)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Mark as read, Apply label "Autoresponse"
Matches: from:(yourorder@dpd.co.uk) subject:(we're expecting your)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Mark as read, Apply label "Delivery confirmations"
Matches: from:(auto-confirm@amazon.co.uk)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Mark as read, Apply label "Order / Payment confirmations"
I’ve had this in place for probably three years and I reckon have only had one or two emails that I would have regretted not seeing - and the one I’m thinking of was, surprise surprise, a promotional offer. At least I could see it, and avail myself of the offer, on my own terms.
Setting these filters up took some time, I’d say a couple of hours, but has likely saved me that each week when clearing down my inbox.
Use the ‘junk’ feature diligently!
Email marketers will hate me for telling you to do this, but, it’s golden.
Outlook has a great separation between ‘Focused’ and ‘Other’ emails.
I can almost guarantee that you’ve never seen an email in the ‘Other’ inbox that you actually needed to respond to - or even read.
When you clear down your emails, don’t just archive them. Take some time to ‘junk’ them if you don’t want them. This gets quicker each time you do it, and you can wave bye bye to those senders who don’t give up.
To make this quicker and more front of mind, I’ve got a button on my Stream Deck for exactly this, programmed to mark it as junk and move onto the next one. My life is as simple as ‘click, click, click’!
(Optional) Give a PA access to your inbox
I’ve toyed back and forth with this one.
If you really want to remove the burden, you can delegate access to a PA, who can respond to things such as meeting requests etc, and provide you with the stuff that truly needs your input.
There are some downsides to this.
First of all, humans can tend towards job creation. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. And, they might not be so keen on the fact that the first four steps will reduce their workload significantly. Plus of course, out of sight is out of mind - many of us focus on our own productivity, but not on that of others.
Secondly, I believe that we all have different judgement parameters for emails. One persons urgent is not another’s.
I’ve tried this, with a few different people. It hasn’t really worked for me and has just caused more frustration. But, I’ll never say never.
Carl Reader is a WH Smith Bestselling Author and international keynote speaker with a real passion for helping people do better. There are two ways to learn more about Carl! You can either follow him on Social Media if you’re just curious (@carlreader on most platforms), or if you’d like to learn a little more about what he does on stage, through content and in the media from a commercial perspective, you can visit his website at www.carlreader.com
You can buy a copy of his last book BOSS IT online, wherever you are in the world. And of course, I’d love you to subscribe to this community to be the first to see everything I have to share - just click the button below. It’s free of charge!
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