
Your Priority Centered Life
Are you feeling tyrannized by your to do list? Are you looking for tips to increase your productivity for better time management? Are you wondering where to begin with a planner or a bullet journal? Do you wonder if it’s at all possible to achieve work-life balance? You’ve come to the right place! “Your Priority Centered Life” will feature useful information you can implement right away and guest interviews that will inspire you to move toward your goals. Host Dr. Alise Murray is a psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a life coach who has spent her career helping overwhelmed, busy adults center their lives around their priorities so they can experience greater fulfillment and achieve higher productivity without burnout.
Want to know where to start? Take the free Prior 10 Life Assessment today! www.prior10.com/assessment
The information contained and documents referenced in the podcast “Your Priority Centered Life” are for entertainment, educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, professional medical or health treatment, diagnosis, or advice. We strongly encourage listeners to consult with medical providers or qualified mental health providers with issues and questions regarding any physical and/or mental health symptoms or concerns that they may have. Furthermore, the opinions and views expressed by podcast guests, partners and/or affiliates are not necessarily those of the podcast host. Dr. Alise Murray’s opinions and views are expressed in her individual capacity and are not to be construed as those of any of her podcast guests, partners and/or affiliates.
Your Priority Centered Life
Episode 134: Beyond Inbox Zero: Managing Email, Voice, and Instant Messaging Like A Pro
Today's inboxes include multiple email boxes, analog mail, voice mail, and text and other instant messaging. In a 2018 survey of American office workers, respondents reported spending an average of 5.6 hours per day on email alone! Today's episode focuses on how you can significantly reduce your time spent processing and responding to the daily deluge of communications we face each day.
Want to get a snapshot of your own life in just minutes? Take the free Prior 10 Life Assessment at www.prior10.com/assessment.
The information contained and documents referenced in the podcast “Your Priority Centered Life” are for entertainment, educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, professional medical or health treatment, diagnosis, or advice. We strongly encourage listeners to consult with medical providers or qualified mental health providers with issues and questions regarding any physical and/or mental health symptoms or concerns that they may have. Furthermore, the opinions and views expressed by podcast guests, partners and/or affiliates are not necessarily those of the podcast host. Dr. Alise Murray’s opinions and views are expressed in her individual capacity and are not to be construed as those of any of her podcast guests, partners and/or affiliates.
(Transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor errors.)
Hello. Welcome back. I'm Dr. Alise, and today we are talking about your inbox. And your inbox of course, is so much more complicated, I'm sure, than it was even just a few years ago. Our inbox now tends to have messages and information coming from email, mail, phone calls, texts , apps like Slack, WhatsApp, Voxer, Teams... coming from a lot of different places.
How on earth do you navigate all that and stay on top of it? And of course this is really important not only to prevent feeling overwhelmed, but also so that other people know that you are taking them seriously, that you are treating their needs with respect. So let's take a look at that and see how we can make this process go a little bit more smoothly.
So first of all, thinking about your email, you may have multiple email accounts. You may have a personal account and a work account. You may have several personal accounts. And it's going to be far easier if you can try to have your email accounts all consolidated when it comes time to check. Now, I know that at some workplaces, they do not let you do this. I personally work for a gym where they do not let me bring their email into a different app, and so unfortunately I have to check that separately. But otherwise, if you are allowed to do this, it's definitely a good idea to just bring everything in so that you're just checking things in one place. You can do this either through forwarding emails, so having it just automatically forward to another account, or you can use an app that pulls everything together for you. I use an app called Slack, which does a great job with this. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.
Next, you want to use filters to try to make things easier. For example, if you have high priority senders, then you don't want them to get lost in the shuffle. Many email programs will allow you to flag certain senders so that you know that when they are trying to reach you, that you can see those messages more easily because they're a higher priority. So they may come right to the top of your email list, or they may be marked with like a lightning bolt or a different color, so that you can see, oh, okay, this is from my partner, or this is from my boss. Really helpful to do that.
You can also set filters so that everything from particular senders goes into a newsletter folder or a shopping folder or anything from this domain gets automatically put into a work folder, for example. And again, I'm not trying to specifically promote Spark, but just using an example, Spark automatically recognizes senders and puts them into folders for, this is a newsletter, this is a notification, that sort of thing.
Once you have set up your filters and consolidated your email, then you want to have set times for processing your messages. We've talked about context switching before. Context switching is when you are switching back and forth from one thing to another, also called alternating attention. And it is really tiring and it takes more time so it just eats into your time and energy. Instead, you want to really try to avoid context switching that comes with checking for messages all day long. So have some set times for processing your messages. And when you do this and how often you do this, basically depends. If that's like a part of your job where it's a heavy part of your day, then of course you're going to need more time to do that. And also, considering how important messages are when they come in will help you to figure out a good frequency for this. But generally speaking, two to four times a day, doing up to a half hour at a time.
Which brings us to the other point of having a set time for returning messages. If your job is not primarily fielding messages, then one to three times a day often works well, and again, a half hour per time for returning the messages is a good rough estimate.
Once you're actually in your inbox and you're looking at these messages, you're going to be making some decisions, and you want these decisions to be really quick and as automatic as you can make them. So your decisions are going to boil down to: is this junk? Is this reference material? Is this something I might want to read? As compared to just skimming, which you're going to do for most of these. And fourth, is this something that is actually an actionable task?
So first thing to do when you're looking through your messages, and particularly when you're looking at email, because I'm expecting that's going to be where you have the highest volume, then you're going to be just looking very quickly for, where is the junk? What some people do is they put everything in archive and then they go through and see what are the few things that they want to pull out of the archive after that and look at more closely. That's one way to do it. I tend to flag the messages that I want to look at a little bit more closely, and if it's not flagged, then it goes into the trash.
And by the way, the difference between trash and archive, which, you may or may not know. With trash in a lot of email programs, trashing a message means it's going to stay in your digital trash can for 30 days, and then it's going to be gone. With an archive, it's more like you're putting it on a bookshelf, so it's not in your inbox. It's more like reference material.
When you're looking at your messages, you may find that there are some quick swipe tricks depending on what program are you're using, what device you're using, so that you can archive or delete very, very quickly. So learn what those are.
Anything that can save you time, that's what you want.
So getting rid of the junk, that's the first thing. And then you're left with things that you might either want to read, you might want to keep as reference material, or you might want to take action on. So for those three categories, the things that are not junk, with reference material, you can go ahead and put that in the archive.
Like an article on how to get your garden ready for planting. Maybe that's something where you're like, "yeah, II don't have any definite plans to work on my garden, but someday I know I'm going to want to plant a nice garden, and so this would be something useful to refer back to." Great. Put that in the archive.
Things that you would want to read. If it's something that is truly, truly quick, then, then great. You can read it and then dispose of it. For most of your read emails, these are going to be things like interesting articles. Maybe you get blogs, that sort of thing. So you can set up a folder that is a "To Read" folder . That reading material becomes either something that you do in your free time, or you can designate some time in your week when you do some reading. So the things that you want to read that are not urgent, you're just going to put those in the archive.
That leaves your action items. So your action items are going to be transferred to your task manager. Your task manager could be an app like Todoist or Remember the Milk or any number of task management apps would apply here. A lot of these task managers have a lot of bells and whistles, lots of different things that you can do in Asana or Trello or whatever you're using. But again, the goal is to be efficient and quick. So typically you're not gonna be using very many of those features.
If you have an analog system, then great. Those items, you're just going to write them in your planner. A lot of times, things that come your way digitally, there's just so many possible action items that it can feel a little overwhelming to now write everything down. If you prefer to use a paper planner, but you don't want to write down every email, then you can just set up a folder of today's tasks and then just set up in your paper planner to go through your digital tasks for the day.
Now when it comes time for returning messages, what's helpful here is if there are certain responses that you send over and over, like for instance, a customer's wanting more information, then have templates so that you can just pull up the template, pop the person's name in, bang, send it to them. So that you're not typing the same thing over and over and over again. You may, for instance, want to get back to people who send you a message by the end of the workday. If you feel like it's going to take you more time, then here's where a template could come in handy where you can just send them the message and say. "Thank you for your inquiry. I will get back to you as soon as possible," just so that they know that, yes, you're on it and you're not ignoring it. And that way you can avoid them checking back, "Hey, did you get this? You know, what did you think?" That sort of thing, which is going to slow you down again.
To make sure that you're not spending too much time on messages, in some cases you may want to, for example, unsubscribe from certain groups. Maybe there are Facebook groups and you are not really enjoying participating, or maybe you just want to not get notifications. When people are posting things in these groups, really think about "what are the messages that I'm not really getting a lot of value out of, that I keep getting?" And think about how you want to handle that.
If it's direct mail that is showing up in your literal mailbox, then you may want to get on your country's service if it has one to be able to block unwanted mail for a period of 12 months, for example.
And of course you can unsubscribe from email. Unsubscribing can be kind of tedious. One thing that can help is to use an app that will speed up the process.
Trimbox is an example of an app that works really well. It'll show you these are repeated people that are emailing you and you can just click keep or unsubscribe, and you can also set it to trash all of the messages that you have from this sender or not, and that can speed things up quite a bit. Setting it up in your task manager as a monthly task can be really useful in just keeping on top of it.
Have a great week and I hope that your week is filled with useful information and actions.