Episode Highlights

• How much time do you lose checking email?
• Addressing FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and other causes of losing your time to email
• Keeping your creative flow active and distraction-free
• Common bad email habits that you need to be aware of
• Declaring “email bankruptcy” to become more productive
• Using filters to clean up your inbox
• How to handle email on your mobile device
• Determining which messages are actionable as a first step towards time management
• Combating the cultural expectation for busyness with email organization

Useful Links

• Asian Efficiency Webinar: Escape Your Email
• FiP Amazon Storefront
• FiP Q&A Submission
• FiP Activity Groups
• Athletic Greens
• Optimize Yourself Program
• Unroll.me
• SaneBox
• AirMail App
• Followup.cc
• Dispatch App
• Omnifocus
• Trello
• EverNote
• Managing Your Email
• Managing Email on Mobile
• Getting Your Inbox to Zero
• Overcoming FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
• Eliminating Email Ping Pong
• Corporate Email Culture
• Writing Better Emails
• Asian Efficiency’s Simple Guide to Email
• Email Timer

About Guest

Zachary is the host of The Productivity Show podcast. When he’s not recording a podcast, he’s responsible for working with Asian Efficiency clients and helping them with their productivity and business challenges.

Zack is a teacher, meditator, skier and non-recovering business, caffeine and productivity junkie. With an appetite for new experiences and drive to broaden his understanding of the world, nothing gives him more pleasure than showing people the useful tools and techniques he has personally crash-tested.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with none other than my productivity brother from another mother, Zack Sexton of Asian Efficiencies. How are you today, sir?

Zack Sexton: Hey, I’m doing well. Zack Arnold from Fitness and Post. It’s good to talk with you, especially after getting a sneak peek of your whole workstation. It’s pretty cool stuff.

Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, so that just as a side note, I did kind of a mini course for the Asian Efficiency Dojo that you guys run, which is a monthly membership site, which is absolutely awesome. If anybody’s wondering why I learned most of the cool productivity hacks and ninja workflow tricks, it is from these guys. These are my super secret source of information. So, yeah, if anybody is interested, like AE Dojo is the place to be, and I did a mini course of the Move Yourself program. I’m very, very excited to get that out to your audience, and I know that you took a look at the course, and you really, really enjoyed

Zack Sexton: It. I did, I did. It had just so much valuable, valuable content. I know that if I ever am suffering from any sort of pain or energy management issues, I’m gonna go to that course and just say, okay, what does Zack or the other experts have to say about this, and review all that material there. So, good job with that. That was incredible. Well,

Zack Arnold: I appreciate that. And speaking of valuable content, we’re going to be doing a gigantic, massive deep dive into the world of email today. But before we go there, I just want to remind my newer listeners that Zack is, I believe this is your third time on the show, and in the past we have talked about task management, we’ve talked about establishing rituals, we’ve talked about different apps to kind of help you go paperless and organize your life. So this is kind of an ongoing series of how to become more productive and work smarter and not harder. So you can go to the show notes, you can find past interviews that I did with Zack, but today is nothing but email. So, that having been said, we’re just gonna dive right in, because email is the bane of my existence, and you’re gonna tell me how it is now basically crippling everybody’s ability to be productive, and I wanna direct people also to an earlier show that I did not that long ago with Ari Meisel, who’s also another productivity guru out there, we talked a little bit about email, but this is going to be a much deeper dive extension into that conversation. So, right away, I just want to start with why is it that we need to be talking about email and why is it such a problem nowadays.

Zack Sexton: Well, on top of being the bane of your existence, I think it’s the bane of a lot of other people, even if they don’t realize it. Email is taking away from more important things that you could be doing, including just relaxing, working, working out, or doing something more fun with your time, and there’s been some studies out there that have shown that email is something that not only isn’t going away, because there’s lots of other alternatives to email that you’ve got. I know you’re a big fan of Trello. There is instant messaging, there’s Slack, there’s HipChat, there’s all these other communication methods that are coming out to the world, and they’re great, and they’re very effective, and you can use them in the right place, but email is not going away. In fact, it’s growing at about a three to 4% rate a year. Right now, the average person gets about 76 emails per day, and that’s just gonna grow. So, if it just took you two minutes to answer each email, that’s over two and a half hours of your day, and that doesn’t include the time that you are spending searching and gathering information and figuring out all you need to do for your work with internal communication. There was a McKinsey study that said that up to three quarters of people’s time, information workers, specifically knowledge workers, who like you, take information and collect it, organize it, and make something new out of it, can spend up to three quarters of their day in email, and it’s unless you’re paid to do that, unless you are part of a customer support team, that’s not your job, and it’s taking it away from your more important task, your priorities.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, but they’re producers and vendors, and that they, they just need my immediate answer, and if I don’t answer them immediately, then they’re just going to be upset. So, I have to be.. you can’t tell me to get out of my inbox. I have to be in my inbox all day long. It can’t be done. I’m sorry, but it can’t be done.

Zack Sexton: Well, there are a lot of reasons why people do feel trapped in their inbox, and I don’t deny those. I think a lot of them, the one that you specifically mentioned, has to do with culture, and maybe the culture of your organization, or the culture of other people’s organization, or potentially dealing with a little bit of FOMO. Maybe you’re just wondering what’s going on when you’re not in your inbox, and there could be something important in there. There very well could be, and we can talk about how to either deal with other people’s poor systems or deal with that FOMO as, as we continue this conversation, for sure.

Zack Arnold: Well, I think the one thing that’s really important that I just want to reiterate before moving forward is that you mentioned customer service, and I am in total agreement with you that there’s only one job where you need to be in your email all day long and you do. To be responsive, and that is if you are serving other customers on a regular basis, and the future of your company is dependent on those customers paying for whatever service you provide, and you need to give them a good experience. So that’s your job. Yes, your life is email, you need to be in your inbox, and you need to be responsive. If you don’t work in customer service, and I would assume that 99.9% of the people that are listening to this are not in customer service, so if you’re listening to this episode, you need to find a better way to manage your email, because when I, when you told me that almost six and a half hours or more of your day is an email, if you’re a creative person that’s doing creative work, or even if you’re a producer that’s managing teams, you’re crippling your ability to get anything done, even though you think you’re being quote unquote busy and responding to people right away. It’s just, it’s absolute madness.

Zack Sexton: Yeah, and that six and a half hour number was an Adobe study, and a lot of it has to do with the just checking or having email in the background, and having those push notifications pop up in front of you, and it just taking your attention away, and a lot of people would be surprised to, if there was somebody behind them, if they were in this study, how much time they actually spend just checking or coming in. I think the average was, I think, 36 times an hour. This was a Wall Street Journal’s report that the average office worker checks their email 36 times an hour, and this is a really big problem when it comes to creative work, especially because when you just check, when you get your attention away from that editing that you are doing, or that tweaking the audio that you are doing, that whatever it is that you are really hyper focused on, when you get your attention away from it. It takes about 25 minutes for the brain to refocus, and then it takes another 15 minutes to regain that sense of flow that really was where the good stuff comes out. So, all of these little checks may not seem like a big deal, but they are taking your focus, they’re taking your attention and demolishing it, so you’re not able to produce the best work that you’re able to produce.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. And this is actually something that I wrote about recently, not about email, but about the idea of working in context. So, I have a recent blog post that I did that is all about editing in context. It’s at Fitness and Post comm slash context, so that’s c o n t e x t s, and I talk about this idea of how to get into a state of creative flow, or also getting into the zone, and if you do just get one single email ding when you’re in the zone, it’s out, and between 25 and 40 minutes is the amount of time it’s going to take to get back in. So, like you said, it’s not just about the distraction for that 30 seconds or the two minutes to respond, or whatever it is, you’re giving up hours of your day of not being able to be creatively focused. So, where I want to go next is starting to talk about the ways that people manage email the wrong way, because I know that you’ve done a lot of extensive research into email behavior, and we’re definitely going to get into the solutions, but before that, I want to talk about the most common problems, and the most common ways that people approach email the wrong way.

Zack Sexton: A big problem people approach email the wrong way is just what we were talking about, is spending too much of their time in it, or letting the notifications come and distract them from the more important work that they’re doing. So that’s a huge problem. It was kind of funny, just this morning I downloaded a new email application. It was called Air Mail, because I actually needed it for a part of the course that we’re building, and I needed to shoot a little bit of video of how to use the application a little bit better. And I hadn’t adjusted the notifications, and this morning when I was coming open up my computer to write, I got a little ding, and I was like, What is going on? I need to figure this out. So, it took me, you know, 30 seconds, and I turned off the notification, and I got back to what I was doing, but it threw me for a loop, because I’m so used to not having those notifications come up and distract me like that. So, that’s a big one. Another huge one that we see is people using their email inbox as their to-do list, and it’s the reason I think a lot of people do it, isn’t the nicest way of saying it, but it’s a little bit laziness, they don’t have their priorities, or they don’t know what their priorities are, so they just wait for other people to tell them what to do, and then they just jump to action, so it is a little bit easier to just say, all right, well, when an email comes in, I’ll then take action, but, like we just said, unless you’re customer service, you need to be proactive, you need to figure out what your projects are, you need to break those down, and you need to work from some sort of list, and you and I are fans of digital list, but even if you are a little bit more old school, and you want to go paper-based, having some sort of task manager that you have that you work with, that’s completely trusted, that you put almost every action that you need to do in one place, is is a solution for that. Same with reference material, a lot of times people. People keep all their emails because they’re worried that hey, they might need that PDF or that image or that audio file someday. Well, if you have a good reference system, you can get all of the important information out of your email and into your trusted reference system. So, those are some of the big things that I see people doing and touching on a few of the solutions for overcoming those,

Zack Arnold: Yeah. And I think that the one that really stands out to me, and I was guilty of this for years, and it’s actually how I found you guys originally, is I turn my email inbox in my to-do list, and I thought, okay, well, if I leave it in my inbox, that’s going to tell me that I have to do something, so once I’ve done it, then I can take it out of my inbox, and then 19,273 messages in my inbox later. I said, hmm, I’m thinking this system isn’t working so well. Maybe I need to do something else. So I just put in, like, inbox zero, or I don’t even remember what the search term was in Google, but you guys popped up, and here we are, two years later, and we’re doing podcasts and doing all this other stuff together, but this is where it all started for me, was realizing that email was crippling my ability to produce creative work, and that was my problem, is that I had this giant inbox, and I have colleagues that have come to me and they’ve said, I just can’t get out of my inbox, where do I start, and they’ll show me their inbox, they have like 26 27,000 messages, and they have 1000s of unreads. Like, if I have three or four unread messages, like right now in my inbox, I was at inbox zero Sunday night. Today, I think I have 29 messages in my inbox, and I’m anxious. I’m like, I need to spend 30 minutes, and I need to process my email and get it cleaned out. And I’ve had people that have shown me 29,000 messages with 4538 messages unread, and like that is insanity. I don’t know how you can make sure that things don’t fall through the cracks and work doesn’t get done. It’s just.. it’s crazy.

Zack Sexton: What do you recommend to them when you see the 29,000 messages?

Zack Arnold: The very first thing that I tell them is, I say, there’s no way that you’re going to be able to process all of those messages properly. You need to declare email bankruptcy, and the way that I declared email bankruptcy, and I’ve walked other people through it, is that you take everything that’s not from this calendar year and you just archive it immediately. Just don’t even look at it, because if it’s something that you haven’t acted on in a year, either to whoever it was that you needed to do things for, they’ve moved on, or they’ve died, or it’s something that just you’ve dropped the ball, it’s gone, and you need to move on with your life. So, just immediately archive everything that’s not in this calendar year. Then I say, go through the ones that you do have in this calendar year and sort by person, and just see, because I’m guessing a bunch of them are just going to be junk mail, subscriptions, things you can bulk delete right away, and then you start to kind of narrow it down to people that are actually important, or projects, or whatever it is, and then you can start to narrow down things that, well, I can probably still archive all these, and from this person, and these are closed threads, I can get rid of all these, and then you start to narrow it down to things you’re like, oh man, this is stuff that I really, really should take care of, but then you get those out in whatever manner of task management you have, and that’s a rabbit hole that you and I could talk about for hours as well, and we have actually talked about it in our past episodes, but then you just get yourself to inbox zero and you start from scratch. So let’s say that they’ve gone through this email bankruptcy process, they started from scratch, let’s get them going with some good workflows that are going to solve their email overwhelm,

Zack Sexton: Cool. Well, first, that’s exactly how I would describe it. I was a little more harsh than you. I said, if it’s over 30 or maybe 60 days, that email is dead on arrival. If it’s something that’s very, very important that needs to get done, they’ll reach out to you some other way, either they’ll give you a call, they’ll send you a text, they’ll email you again. So, if it’s over, maybe even a smaller threshold, that might help you get through that bankruptcy process a little bit quicker. And a good hack to clear out even more of the dead weight is if you search your inbox, whatever inbox you use, unsubscribe. If you just search for that term, you’ll see all the newsletters that you’ve signed up for, and you could automatically archive those, because most of those are just informational and purpose, and you, there’s less likely that there’s going to be any important actions in there. So,

Zack Arnold: The only caveat I have to that is that when, if people are here going to do email bankruptcy and they search for unsubscribed, you need to unfilter fitness and post. I’m just saying, just saying,

Zack Sexton: Hey, if you emailed them 30 days ago, 90 days ago, you don’t care, it’s all right.

Zack Arnold: And by the way, 30 days is way better than a year, so just forget everything I said about a year. Listen to the other Zack, do 30 days.

Zack Sexton: Well, it’s whatever your comfort zone is. I would say there’s no hard and fast rule, you can do whatever you want, but just know it’s going to take a little bit longer, especially with 29,000 emails. I imagine at least seven or eight are from that year, that might be too big a project for you. You might have some resistance. You might never start where, if you’re like, “Okay, I’m really gonna do this and make that cut off line 30 days, you’re probably working in the maybe the 1000 range, and then use that unsubscribe hack, and now you’re at a couple 100, and then you can start working from there, so. So that I agree with your strategies, the numbers or the timelines, those could be adjusted as you will. The first step, though, is once you go through that process, if you need to go through that process, is handling the amount of email that’s coming in, because you can have a great system, but if you’ve got 234, 1000 emails coming in a day, I don’t care how efficient your system is, you’re not going to be able to handle it, and nobody’s at that level, but I have talked to a lot of people that are in the 345, 100 emails a day range, and it’s completely overwhelming, so some things to do are to start using filters, so this is something that we suggest using a little bit more sparingly, but if you’re part of a team and let’s say you’re using Slack or HipChat, and you get a notification every single time something happens, you could, you can often filter those notifications into a folder, and if you ever need to go look at them, you can. So that’s a good example of a filter you could potentially use. Another service that’s free, they’ve got a little bit of advertising in them, but it’s.. it feels worth it to me. It’s called unroll.me and if you’re a Gmail user, you can sign up for this service. And what it does is it looks at all the newsletters that have come in your inbox, and you can decide what to do with it. You could either say, “Hey, it’s Fitness and Post, or “It’s Asian Efficiency. I want that email to keep going into my email inbox, or you can be like, “Hey, this is cool, I like it, but you know, I don’t need it distracting me every single day. So I’m going to put it in what’s called a roll up, and I’ll explain what that is in a moment. Or you could be like, “Hey, this is worthless, this is spam, this is junk mail, or “This isn’t important to me anymore. I’m going to unsubscribe completely, and it manages to unsubscribe a little bit more quickly than you would if you individually unsubscribe from each of these emails. The roll up is a collection of the newsletters that you would have gotten that day. So, let’s say you would have gotten 12 newsletters that day. Instead of getting 12 individual emails, you get one email that has all 12 of those emails on there that you could read and scan, and if you’re interested in that, you could then click on that email and read further and see the images, click on the links, and do whatever you need to do with that. So that’s that kind of attacks the problem of too much email. I gave you some notes on what we could talk about, so I’ll let you drive the conversation, but the other four points I wanted to make is not having a system, not having enough focus, the FOMO, which we already just touched on briefly, and dealing with other people’s poor communication systems. So these are things that we’re going to address in an upcoming webinar that’s going to be on October 11, I think we’re going to talk about it at the very end, but that was one step that I would suggest. Where do you want to go next? Zack,

Zack Arnold: Yeah. So, the before going forwards, I wanted to kind of piggyback off of unroll.me a little bit, because this is a game changer. I use this every single day, and it’s almost like having a morning newspaper. So, the analogy that I’ve used with other people, where it’s clicked in their minds, they’re like, oh my god, this genius, just imagine right now that it was before the time of email, and every three minutes somebody knocks on your office door and says, hey, a new new article is just written in this newspaper. You’re like, okay, great, I’ll read it. Five minutes later, knock, knock, knock. Hey, guess what? We just wrote a new article, we just released it. Okay, great. Well, I’m kind of.. no, we need you to read it. All right, all right, I’ll read it. Three minutes later. Knock, knock. Guess what? There’s a new article in the sports section. You’re like, enough. But then imagine that somebody invents something called the newspaper. They hand you the newspaper one time in the morning. You’re like, oh, look at all these articles that I can peruse on my leisure and decide which ones I want to read and which ones I don’t. unroll.me is the email version of doing that, and it is a huge time saver. That was one of my biggest issues, is that in all of my research to learn everything that I have over the years about health and fitness and all the other things that I’m involved in, I probably have 250 to 300 newsletter subscriptions, and I was getting at least 100 or 150 emails a day, and at first I was thinking, well, I need to read this, it’s probably important, it’s good to learn, and then it just, I hit, I just hit newsletter bankruptcy, it wasn’t even email bankruptcy, I found this, and now I get, and the other thing I want to let people know is it’s not just for Gmail anymore, you can also do it for other domains and accounts, so it’s for Gmail, it also works for iCloud accounts, I don’t know if it does it for custom domains, but I, all, I do have it on my Mac account, it’s 100% free, takes about two minutes to set up. You get one email per day per account, so I get four emails all at 730 in the morning, and has all of my newsletters for the day, and I scan for two minutes. I like, oh, I want to read this one, I click on it, it opens up the email on a browser, it’s absolute perfection. So this is the place to start,

Zack Sexton: And that’s another nice feature, you can decide what time of day you want it to come in, so maybe the afternoon after lunch you want to read your newspaper, and I’ve never heard that analogy before, though. Zack, that’s genius. I’m gonna steal that from you for sure.

Zack Arnold: Absolutely, take it. I was telling Ari Mizell about my analogy of doing laundry and batching emails, he’s like, yeah, I’m gonna have to steal that from you, so I’m gonna have to start trademarking my analogies, I’ll. These stupid little analogies they make, but anyway, so yes, we’ve talked about the idea of doing filters, and filters is something that I do, where all of the paperwork that I get for my job, because you get like 456, emails a day, where you’re part of a mass distribution list, if you’re on a TV show or a movie, I filter all of those, so I never see them, they’re not deleted, I can always find them if I need them via search or in a specific folder, they’re marked as red, so they’re never unread, and they’re never in my inbox, so I never see them unless I need to find them. So I filter all those, then I filter all of these subscriptions, and then the next level that you can go to that I want to talk about is having an actual email filtering program that you pay for. I personally have Sanebox, and it has changed my life, but I know there are other options out there as well. So, let’s talk about the next level of filtering and gathering your email. Yeah,

Zack Sexton: Sanebox, we would agree, is a game changer. It’s a little bit more expensive, it’s a paid service, but if you really, really want to take your filters and email to the next level, and and have a system that you can get to inbox zero, so completely have no emails in your inbox, which Zack, I’m sure people haven’t experienced in years. They may not even know what it looks like. Some email applications have a nice little picture, you might not have ever seen that nice little picture when it comes to inbox zero, but Sanebox can help you get there by creating these filters automatically. One thing I said, use filters sparingly, because you can accidentally set some things up where you miss out on information if you put the wrong keywords in there or the wrong description. You could set a filter and actually miss some important information. Or Sanebox learns your habits, learns who, okay, you open these emails, you respond to these emails, these are important ones. You never open these emails. Let’s put it in a filter called Sane Later, so you can check them out later. Or this is spam. This is something that you don’t want. You could put it in, what is it called? Is it called your sane hole? I actually don’t use

Zack Arnold: It. I don’t know if I should edit out the same hole or not. I won’t, because it’s just too far. We’ll keep, we’ll keep in the sane hole, and I’m gonna email them and let them know they need a sane hole.

Zack Arnold: That’s

Zack Sexton: What I, that’s what I call it with Mike. But I guess now that I say that out loud, it’s probably not called the same hole. We’re

Zack Arnold: Gonna stick that message in the sane hole,

Zack Sexton: Just stick it in the same hole. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: No, it’s called the same black hole, sane

Zack Sexton: Black hole, black. Oh, it’s just missing one word, close enough, Saint Hall, or that’s what it’s called. And the nice thing about that is, if you happen to ever have gotten on a spammy list, a lot of times when you click unsubscribe, they’re like, oh, this is a person that actually cares about their email, let’s send them more junk, or let’s sell their email to other people that are going to sell them more junk, or if you do, if you put it in the same hole, you’re gonna have to rate this one mature. If you put it into that filter, it will automatically take it out of your inbox, but it won’t notify the potential spammer that this is an active account.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s just one of the many, many benefits of Sanebox, and I should really become an affiliate, because I love this service, and I want everybody to start using it. But kind of going back to my crazy, stupid analogies, because I’ve shown this to a couple of people, and I think it costs like 30 bucks a month or something, I don’t remember what it is, but like, wait a second, $30 a month, that’s crazy, that’s like three times my Netflix subscription, but now imagine that I said to you, I’m going to give you a dedicated personal assistant for $30 a month. They’re going to read every single one of your emails, they’re going to be available 20-four hours a day, seven days a week to do so, and they’re automatically going to tell you which emails you need to act on, which ones that you don’t have to act on, and which ones you never need to see. So you’re gonna free up hours and hours of your life, like if somebody said to me I would get a personal assistant, like all in 24/7 for $30 a month, I’d be like, where in the world do I sign up? So when, when I got Sanebox, it was just like the clouds lifted and the sky opened up and the angels started singing. It is an amazing service if you want your sanity back,

Zack Sexton: Especially when it comes to attachments, and what it’s got the sane attachments that you can automatically download things, put it into your reference system, relabel it with Hazel. There’s a bunch you can do with Sanebox that you can’t do anywhere else, and if it’s going to save you what, a half hour a day, $1 a day, is that worth 30 minutes? I would say

Zack Arnold: Yes. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, and the number one reason that I actually got it, and I actually started kind of this next level search for smart filtering with follow up.cc but Sanebox has the same feature, but I actually think it’s even better, and this is the idea that if you get an email and you read it and you’re like, you know what, this is a really important email, but not until next Monday, I do not need to deal with this right now. I know that it’s important, and I have to act on it, but I just don’t have time, and there’s no real time pressure. All you do is click one button, or just forward it to, like, the email address you would forward it to is next Monday, 7am at sanebox.com It’s out of your inbox, it disappears, you don’t have to think about it, and then. Monday morning at 7am boop, it pops up in your inbox, and you have this nice little list of emails that you have to act on. So that to me was the thing that made it worth the money. All the other features were gravy, and I consider them like free, but it was the same reminders that made it worth the money for me.

Zack Sexton: And if people aren’t willing to make or are unable to make that investment, there’s a lot of iOS, and I’m sure Android applications that have that snooze feature. The one that I use is Air Mail, which is a pretty decent one. And if you’re, and I’m sure this one is only Gmail, if you’re a Gmail user, Boomerang is another application. It is paid, but the free application part of things you can get away with quite easily, and it has that feature where you’d be like, hey, let’s either read this later, or hey, follow up if this person hasn’t responded to me, or let’s send this out into the future, maybe it’s Friday, and I don’t want it to get lost in their email inbox over the weekend, you could, you could say, all right, well, send it Monday at 9am so that’s that’s another good tool, since we’re talking tools.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I’m glad that you brought up iOS, because that’s another direction that I want to go, is the idea of email on your phone, and I have a feeling that you and I might have slightly differing opinions, but I don’t have an email app on my phone. I never check email on my phone ever, because that way I am more focused on checking email, knowing that if I’m at my computer, I’m going to focus on it for 30 minutes, and I’m not tempted when I’m out doing something with my family or out at a meeting to think, oh, let me just double check, I’m not going to do anything, I just want to double check and make sure everything is okay, that’s when you get sucked into the black hole, and I don’t have email on my phone, and it was a game changer for me, but let’s say that somebody’s not willing to hand over the crack cocaine of having, and I wish that we still had Blackberry, so I could still say the word crackberry, but let’s say that somebody’s just not willing to let go that addiction that they have through the email on their phone. Let’s talk about managing further ways that you can manage if we’re talking about just a mobile device.

Zack Sexton: Actually, just today, which is september 20, as we record this on the Aging Efficiency blog, a article came out on how to handle email on your mobile device, and the system we got from Napoleon, and the system is called Triage. When you’re on your phone, there’s a lot you can actually do on phones these days that you couldn’t do even two three years ago, mainly the integrations that they have with task managers and the email, the phone email applications have with task managers, also how tied they are with reference materials, so you can send a lot of information to to where it needs to be on your phone relatively quickly, but the basic idea of email triage is the same way as Napoleon dealt with his soldiers that were injured during the war. You either decide, okay, this email is dead on arrival, or this email will be fine, no matter really what happens, or this email needs some immediate action in order for to stay alive, basically. So, if you need an immediate action, then you could just open the email, respond, just give a quick response, because you’re on your phone, you’re not going to be able to type all that much or all that quickly. You can give that response there. If it’s something that, like most emails, doesn’t need an absolute hardline immediate response, you can then put it in your task manager, add it to your calendar, delete it, archive it, do whatever you need to do with it. But the basic idea is just to get to your email to a manageable level before you can go to your desktop and really process your email properly. That is the basic idea, and I can give you the link for that, so you can put it in the show notes if people want to dive in deeper. I think there’s a video with it too, which is pretty cool.

Zack Arnold: Well, I’m glad that you specified that it was Napoleon Bonaparte, because I was thinking for a second that we were talking about how Napoleon Dynamite processes email. It’s like, God, get out of your inbox. Jeez, that’s not a really, that’s not a really good system. But anyway, I digress. And by the way, I haven’t even had bulletproof coffee this morning. I don’t know what’s going on today. I just.. I think I get excited when the Productivity Brothers get on the show together. I don’t know, so if I wanted to drill down even further, and I want to go more into kind of this overall workflow that you were talking about and alluding to a bit, but as far as the mobile apps, are there specific ones like you’d mentioned Air Mail? I know that they’re like Gmail apps now, like all kinds of different ways to manage email. I was just doing it in Apple Mail, which is the worst mobile app. It is horrible, which is probably the reason I hate email on the phone, but I just don’t like typing or processing things on my phone ever more than any. There’s two reasons. One of them is because it’s very distracting, and I always have my phone with me, and it takes me out of whatever moment I’m in, and whatever I’m doing, but number two, it’s actually a very physical reason that I don’t like using the phone. There is no good posture or position to work on a phone and hold it, and there’s so many different negative adaptations that happen in your body when you’re holding a phone and processing information on it, that I was just like, I’m done with the shoulder pain, I’m done. With the neck pain, I’m done with attention headaches, and a lot of it just stemmed from holding a phone all day long. So, I kind of digress there, but those are the reasons I don’t like being on the phone. But if you were only able to have one email app on your phone, what is the one that you would use?

Zack Sexton: Currently, I am using Airmail, and the reason I like Air Mail is because I was a fan of Dropbox’s mailbox application had some nice swipe features, so you swipe left for to archive, swipe right for the snooze, and I was just, I just thought that was a nice user interface. And Airmail has the same, except for when you swipe, you could even swipe to Evernote, or you could swipe to Omnifocus, or you could swipe to Trello. So I’m a big fan of Air Mel right now. Another very, very good one, just to give a second example, for iOS is Dispatch, and that has some really great integrations, even stronger integrations, especially if you’re an Omni Focus user, which I believe you still are. Dispatch, if you’re Omnifocus, Air Mail for everybody else.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I am, I’m an Omnifocus power user, like I live and breathe inside Omni Focus, and if I don’t have Omni Focus organized, or I don’t have access to it, then I immediately regress into my former ADD mode, where I just kind of walk in circles and say, I don’t know what to do right now, I don’t know what to do right now. What should I be doing right now? What am I? So I have too many things to do, I’m so overwhelmed. As soon as I have Omnifocus open, it’s like, oh, now I see what I need to do. I feel so much better. So, yes, I still live and breathe task management and Omnifocus, but as you know, and as my audience knows, everything else that I act on and organize is all in Trello. So, when it comes to my task and organizing, what needs to be done next is organized and Omnifocus, but then everything goes into Trello for the creation of projects, or working on a TV show, or just dealing with my daily habits, my routines, anything that I’m doing, work-related or personal-related, is all in Trello, and having an email system between email and Trello was imperative as well. So that was where I wanted to go next. Is you have a flow chart that you created for me, and you kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but I want to go a little bit more step by step for people, and I’m going to put this full flow chart right in the show notes for this episode, but it starts at your inbox and something comes in, you have a new message, and what is the first question that somebody needs to ask,

Zack Sexton: Is it actionable?

Zack Arnold: Yes, so is it actionable? Do I need to do something, and if the answer is yes, what I will do is I will immediately say one of the following based off your flow chart, and you had mentioned this as well. Is this something that I can answer in under two minutes? Yes, I’ll probably do it. If not, then I’m going to send it somewhere else. So the two minutes are shorter, one that simple. If it’s longer. Let’s talk about some of these specific apps that we can use to organize our inbox to clean it out, because I think it’s one thing to tell people you need to act on it, and then they say, “Great, what does that mean? Like, what? What should I actually do to act on it? Because otherwise, what happens is you get 100 emails a day that go into your task manager, and now, instead of your inbox overwhelming you, your task manager inbox overwhelms you. So, what are the different ways that we can organize these emails that need actions?

Zack Sexton: Awesome. So, if it’s actionable, one of the things that’s nice about 2016 even though we get so many damn emails, it’s very easy to send those emails to a digital to-do list, whether you’re using Omnifocus or Trello or to-do list, it’s easy to do, it’s easy to integrate, and it’s very quick to send it. I would suggest doing your GTD workflow right there. Getting things done says that all your tasks should start with an action, and so if you’ve, if you see within the email that there is two or three, or hopefully just one action that you need to take, you say, “Okay, well, what is that action? Start with a verb and decide, spell out exactly what that is, and you could type that right in there, just like if you had the idea in your head, or if somebody came up to you in the hall, or you’re at a meeting and there was an action, it’s the same way, it’s just a different input that you got that action from, and the reason it’s best to do it then is because then you’re not reading and rereading the whole email to pull out the specific action, and you’re only touching that email once, which saves a lot of time and mental energy. So, you just decide the action. If there’s any next actions, you can write all those down right there. If there is a specific context that you need with it, so maybe you need to be at the office, maybe you need to be with a different person. You could add that context if your application allows you to do that, and if there’s a specific date that it’s actually due, you can add a due date right there. You can also add a defer date if you know, okay, this project’s due in three months, I probably need about two weeks to work on it. Let’s put it out into the future 10 weeks. You can do that as well. So, those are all the things that you would just normally do in a task manager. So, for that information came from an email,

Zack Arnold: Right? So, now we’ve talked a little bit about how we can organize them if they are tasks. So, if I’m going to just be taking my emails and. Putting them into another inbox and hopefully organizing them further. Why specifically, and I can think of one reason off the top of my head, but I want to know what you think first. Why specifically can’t I just continue to use my inbox to be my to-do list?

Zack Sexton: I heard someone say, I don’t know who, but I like repeating it. Is a your inbox, your email inbox is a to-do list other people can add stuff to. That’s a pretty big reason for me, because it’s a your to-do list. Your manager is something that you can control, where your email inbox, you really can’t control that. So the experience you were having when you were saying, oh, if I just leave it, leave these tasks here, I can get them done, and here being your email inbox, but what you found was that more emails came in, and it took those tasks that were important and pushed them down, so you have no way to really prioritize which actions you want to want to have done, and the other reason was the one that I already explained is that an email may be two or three paragraphs, and there’s only just five words that you need to know what the next action is, and you have to reread that whole amount of information in order to get to it. So, lack of prioritization, rereading information that’s not important, getting lost in the mix of other emails, plus email, I don’t know about for you, I imagine, actually. So, because I think we’re wired pretty similarly with emails, can come in and they can be distracting. They could be, “Oh man, there’s a sale right there. “Oh, this seems interesting, or “Oh no, this seems like I’m in trouble, and you start to act on the urgent task or lose your focus instead of prioritizing, organizing, and just focusing in on the two or three four big tasks that you want to get done that day, you’re just scattered, you’re all over the place, and and not getting things done in the most effective manner you could if you separated your task manager inbox from your email inbox.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s the number one reason, and there are many, many reasons, but the number one reason for me is that if your to-do list is your inbox and you’re trying to get things done, you continue to have incoming information that’s going to distract you, whereas with a to-do list you can put your phone or you can put your computer in airplane mode, you can turn off the Wi-Fi, and you can eliminate all outside distractions, but if you have your email inbox as your to-do list, that means your email program has to be open, and your email program should not be open unless you need it. So, I will not have my email program open 95% of the day, and I’ll go with specific times of the day, and I’ll check it, I’ll go through, I’ll sort whatever I need to, I’ll respond to whatever I need to, and then I close it, and I’m not getting any notifications, and people just freak out. They’re like, “Oh my god, but people just assume that I’m going to respond. But you’ll be amazed at how people are really not that worried about you responding immediately, and if they do need you to respond immediately, they will get a hold of you, they will text you, they will slack you, they will go on Trello. They’re like 47 ways people can get a hold of you, besides email, but email should not be your instant messaging tool, and that is just a huge, huge fallacy that people have. Is, oh, I just, I’m communicating with people all day long on email. Well, there are other tools that do that now. You don’t have to do it in your email,

Zack Sexton: And if you’re a leader in your organization, you could dictate when and why you should be using different things at Asian Deficiency. We don’t use any internal email, but if we did, we have a list here that says, okay, emails 48 hours response time, our other system, Jira, 24 hours, hip chat, I think we have it at two or three hours if it’s a weekday, so we indicate what the medium is, and how quickly we should get a response, or maybe you should hear the situations you should jump on a Skype call, because we’re a completely remote team, we need to do that sometimes.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, so that’s really the, which is one of the many, many reasons that people need to get out of their inbox, and to piggyback off of the quote that you had. I have a very, very similar quote. This is from high-performance coach Brendan Burchard, who’s one of the top high-performance coaches and speakers in the world, alongside people like Tony Robbins. And his quote is that your inbox is just a convenient organizational system for other people’s agendas. And as soon as I heard that, I’m like, oh my god, that makes so much sense. I need to get out of my email, and that was when everything really started to change for me.

Zack Sexton: Cool, yeah, that’s a good way of putting it too.

Zack Arnold: We’ve talked now about the idea of how you’re going to take an inbox action, get it out of your email inbox, and then process it to a task manager, but the other piece of information that might be important that isn’t a task is something that you’re going to want to refer to later or keep, so if it’s not a task and it’s not junk, and it’s something I say, oh, this is really good information, I don’t have to respond, I don’t have to do anything, but I sure want to be able to find this now. What do we do with reference materials?

Zack Sexton: You send it to your reference material holder, so whether you use Dropbox or Evernote or. Or drive, it’s very easy to send that information there, and you can, you can organize that in any fashion you want. I’m a big fan. I used to be a little bit more of a drive guy, but I’ve been hanging out with my friend Stacy Harmon a little bit too much, and she’s shown me the ways of Evernote, and I’m a pretty big fan of that system in there is just putting stuff into Evernote. It all goes into one location, so it’s a new inbox called In Process. And then I go through that once a week and process all that information. So I’m looking at it right now. I have some notes from a course that I was taking. I have actually.. here’s an email in here. Oh yeah, the email has a link to a webinar that I wanted to go to. I should probably should have put that to my task manager.

Zack Arnold: I was just gonna scold you and say that’s not a reference, that’s a task.

Zack Sexton: Yeah, why is that in there? Okay, I’ve got some sort of automation that’s acting up because it’s in there like five times, so see, be careful with filters, people. I, and I know this, this one, and it is in my task manager as well. So I go in there and I process that, meaning if, if there is anything actionable, like I happen to find, as I would look through it, I will put it in my task manager. If not, I organize it into a folder, or just put it. I have one big folder called Random, because Evernote has really good search, so if I ever need it again, I can find it in there.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, the search function in Evernote is so good that you almost don’t need an organizational system at all if you know the terms that you want, but Evernote is where I put all of my references, so kind of going back to these real-world analogies. If you didn’t have any technology and you were sitting at the desk from the 1960s that just has little lamp on it, and the typewriter, and the calendar in front of you. You have somebody come in your room, they ask you to do something, you write it down on a piece of paper on your to-do list. If you have somebody that comes in and says, “Here’s an important document, I want you, I want to be able to find this in six months, you put it in your filing cabinet. Evernote is your digital filing cabinet, and one thing that’s really, really cool, and I’m sure that you know 10 tricks that are even better than mine, but I don’t even really have an Evernote inbox. I have kind of that random folder where it’s like I’m just going to throw something in here because I might need it, and I can search for it, but I don’t really need to file it. But I have specific Evernote notebooks, and if you have an email, you can send your emails directly to whatever notebook you want, and you can even set up filters to send that email directly to your notebook and have it tag all in your email system, so you never have to go into Evernote. So, for example, if I get an email from somebody that’s like, ‘Oh, I love this information, and it’s about, you know, it’s great nutrition information, this is something that I want to share on the Fitness and post Facebook page. All I have to do is hit forward and I send it to an address that’s linked to my Evernote account, and then in the subject line I just put the notebook name, and then I just do hashtag in the tag, so it would be hashtag nutrition. Then, as soon as I go into my Evernote notebook, and this could be six months later, I could say, “Oh, where are all the.. I want to put up some posts about nutrition right now. I just go to my Evernote notebook, and every single email that I’ve forwarded, or any single web page that I’ve clipped, is automatically in that folder and tagged with nutrition, and I’ve never even opened Evernote to make that happen.

Zack Sexton: That’s pretty good. That’s more advanced than my system.

Zack Arnold: Well, yeah, so that’s the difference for me, is at first when somebody showed me the reference system with Evernote, like you can forward an email to Evernote. I’m like, oh, that’s so cool. And then I open Evernote, and I’m like, oh my god, I just have another inbox that I have to organize again, and there’s like 200 messages in here. But once I saw that, I could send it exactly to the file folder and have it tagged the way that I wanted to. Now I just.. I probably forward to Evernote 50 times a day. What it means is that I don’t even have to read something. I’ll just kind of scan through and be like, all right, I see what this is. I know that I don’t need to read it now, but three weeks from now, I know I’m going to be looking for this, so I’m just going to send it to this notebook. I’m going to take it this way, and then when I’m kind of in that deep dive focus mode for whatever the subject is, it’s all organized into one place, so it makes all of my future tasks much easier, because I’m always in the same mindset when I’m processing them.

Zack Sexton: Cool, I like it. Yeah, I’m gonna have to up my system there.

Zack Arnold: Everything that we’ve talked about so far has been this idea of me processing all of my emails in a certain way, but what do you do if you’re stuck in a culture that just isn’t really on board with this, and you have a producer that sends you 15 emails an hour and they come knock on your door, and this is no exaggeration. They’ll send you an email, they’ll hit the send button, they’ll walk to your door, they’ll knock on it, and they’ll say, “Hey, did you just get my email? And I’m like, “Are you flipping kidding me right now? Really, how do you deal with these cultures that don’t understand the detriment of email?

Zack Sexton: I think knowledge is power here. If you explain some of what we’ve talked about on this show in a non-combative, not overly confrontive way, just saying, hey, here are some of the priorities that I’m working on right now. These are the main, main tasks. It’s, it’s much more helpful. There’s a lot of science out there, a lot of research out. That shows that if I’m able to focus for a few hours on end on this, these projects, the creativity will be higher, that I’ll get things done faster, that there’ll be less mistakes. So, let’s talk about it. Is this something that we can do? Can I have some on email, off hours, and some off email hours, or maybe we could set up office hours, where we’re, or some sort of schedule or cadence, where I check email in the morning, I check email in the afternoon, and that’s if you, if you need something that’s a little bit more urgent, we could use another medium, like we were talking about with Slack, or hip chat, or text message, or a knock on the door, if it’s really that important, or a phone call, if it’s, if it’s that important. So, I think having the conversation is a big one. I would try to frame things as much as possible to the benefit of the person, so don’t say, “Hey, this is bugging me, say, “Hey, this would be better for you, because I will be able to work more, I will be able to get more done, the quality will improve. One of my favorite episodes of the Productivity Show, think it was number 38 it had a weird name, it was called I Know Kung Fu with Patrick Hart, but it was all about saying no. His problem was meetings, his boss had him going to all these different meetings, and he wasn’t really clear on what his expectations were in those meetings. Did he take meeting notes? Does he need to be at all these meetings? And then he got this huge project dropped on him, and realized that he could not handle the project and all of the other things, obligations that he had. So, what he did is he wrote down all the obligations and the times that it took him to complete these things, added up to a 7080 hour work week, and said, “Listen, what are my priorities? What do I need to focus on? And in a 10 minute meeting, that was very positive, it wasn’t combative or anything like that, just hours and hours and hours shaved off every single week, and he was able to focus on the project, and I actually just met him this summer, I was on a road trip with my fiance, Nikita, and we happened to be going through his town, and he’s like, yeah, the project was a big hit, just got done a couple months ago, and it was all about, you know, learning to say no and learning to set these boundaries, so that’s what I would suggest is the best course of action, if you are, have are underneath somebody who has a has some poor expectations about what email is and how to use it, if you’re on top, if you’re the one with these bad behaviors, it’s time to change, it’s time to learn some systems, it’s time to figure out the most efficient way, because if you are leading an organization, everyone’s going to be following you. So, if you are in your inbox 24 hours a day, so will everyone else, and it’s not only hurting your productivity, it’s hurting your entire team. So, I’d encourage you to do some of these best practices that we talk about here, join a webinar that we’re going to be doing on october 11 about a lot of the problems and solutions that you could have for email. If you can go over to Asian efficiency.com forward slash e y e, which stands for escape your email to sign up, or any of the articles that that Zack, you’re going to put in the show notes I gave you, like 10, probably the best one. It would be the simple guide to managing your email, which goes over the email system, which would be the easiest thing for you to do over the show notes at Ed Fitness and Post. Then then you’re in a position to have some of the best systems that that we’ve tested that that other people have have used that are just more efficient and will get you out of your inbox, so you can spend more time doing the things that you love, which could be your work, which could be your family, which could be your spirituality, whatever that is. This this processing isn’t effective, it isn’t helpful to anybody, and that’s the whole goal of this.

Zack Arnold: I could not have said it any better myself. And I believe that from now on, I’m just going to no longer refer to you as my productivity brother from another mother. I’m just now going to call you the email whisperer. The show notes for this episode alone are going to be like the bible of how to tame your email and get out of your inbox, but for those that want to go to the next level and really become an email ninja, I cannot emphasize enough, check out the webinar. I’ve seen some of the content behind the scenes that they have put together, and this is the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much amazing stuff that you can learn to get out of your inbox, and as soon as you do, you’re going to have your life back, I promise. So, speaking of giving people their life back, I’m gonna give you your life back, and I’m gonna let you go, but I cannot thank you enough for being on the show today.

Zack Sexton: Hey Zack, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me come on and share some of these ideas with, with your great audience. We really appreciate.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, the show notes were prepared by Jakin Rintelman, and this show is executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.

The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.