Organizing Your Inbox: An Email Fanatic's Guide

We recently wrote a post entitled Performance Improvement for Behavior Change. One way to have performance improvement in your own life is to take control of your email inbox. So we thought we would explore the topic of organizing your inbox in more detail.

Why Organizing Your Inbox Is a Good Idea

Are you familiar with that sinking feeling you get when you return to your email after being away for a few days (or even just a few hours)? You heave a big sigh when you see the volume of unanswered messages that have piled up in your absence. Yikes, your inbox has reached unmanageable proportions!

An out-of-control inbox can feel like a deep hole that you'll never be able to dig yourself out of. But it doesn't have to be like that! With just a few simple steps, you can get your inbox organized, take control of your incoming mail (instead of letting it control you), and seriously reduce your email stress.

·      Clear It Out: Use snail mail as a way to think about your emails. If you deposited every letter or package you receive on your kitchen table without throwing anything out or filing anything away, your table would soon be buried under an unmanageable pile of papers and parcels. Your inbox is like that table - it's most useful when you get rid of things or place papers in your filing cabinet. Here's how to go about organizing your inbox.

·      Delete: Delete any emails you'll never want to access again (e.g., the announcement of this week's sale on business class flights to Honolulu - alas, not this year!). Be careful though, and avoid deleting items representing a record that you may need later for your expense account (e.g., a receipt for your trade magazine subscription).

·      File: Place the emails you need to keep in appropriately labeled folders (for Gmail users, archive them).

·      Unsubscribe: The biggest inbox clogger is the stuff you get sent on a recurring basis. So, next time you throw out a bunch of emails without even opening them, pause and consider what you're deleting. If you trash emails from the same source three times without reading them, it's time to hit the unsubscribe button (or to send them to spam). Your inbox will thank you.

·      Consolidate: Increasingly, people are dealing with more than one inbox. In most situations, it's required that you keep your work and personal emails separate. But if you have some flexibility, consolidating your various email addresses will mean fewer sites to log into and manage. One choice is to do away with your older addresses. You also have the option to have an email sent to one address forwarded to another.

·      Put Your Inbox to Work: Train your inbox to know where to file an email. This way, when you're looking for something later, it's easy to find. You can also use Gmail to have some emails automatically skip your inbox. For example, if you auto-pay your membership in a professional organization, you can automatically archive the email under the label "Memberships."

·      Plan for Later: This applies to those emails that you know you can't get to until later, but you don't want to forget them. There's now a useful plugin aptly called Boomerang (currently available for Outlook and Gmail). You can schedule an email to disappear and return later when you're ready to deal with it.

Boomerang has some other life-changing features. You can schedule an email to be sent later, and it also allows you to set up recurring emails. The tool can also remind you if someone doesn't get back to you. For example, if you email Katie on Tuesday about a report you need by Friday, you can ask Boomerang to make that email chain reappear at the top of your inbox at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday if she hasn't responded yet. And if she does respond, Boomerang understands not to bring the email back.

Make a Start

Are you inspired to get started? Carve out some time this week to pay attention to organizing your inbox. Giving your inbox a thorough overhaul might take up a few hours, but the time (and stress) you save in the long run will make the effort worth it.

Organizing Your Inbox: Final Thoughts

There's more to being organized than getting control of your email inbox. Let Shaping Development help you shape up your work life and become a better leader. Book a talk with us to learn more.

Time Management for Leaders: 7 Tried and True Tips

As a leader, it seems that many things conspire to prevent you from focusing on your main roles – increasing sales and propelling your organization forward. This is why effective time management for leaders is crucial to your success. And, it's not just about getting everything done – it's also about having a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day and avoiding burnout. The following are seven time management tips for leaders to help you balance your responsibilities.

1.    Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize

Prioritizing what you want to accomplish is your number one time management for leaders step. Commit to writing the most important tasks you want to get done this week and this month. You can even go further out and include this quarter or even this year. Your list should be confined to the level of tasks (not projects.)

·      Example: Your project might be preparing for an upcoming tradeshow. Your tasks might be training your staff to manage your booth or getting your marketing materials ready.

Give each task a deadline but leave some blank time to cope with those unexpected tasks that will inevitably pop up to steal away your time and attention. 

2.    Avoid Robo-Checking Your Email

Your email inbox is waiting to enslave you! Don't let yourself be subjugated. Set aside regular times to read and reply to messages. Let your co-workers and employees know when you will be electronically available. Request that they only contact you during your offline hours by calling or texting with urgent issues. And don't be tempted to respond to those email pings and pop-ups that will keep alerting you even when you've gone home for the day. Silence your phone when you retire for the night or leave it in another room.

3.    Organize Your Emails

You'll spend less time in your inbox if it's organized. Here are some ways to keep your inbox from taking you over.

·      Delete emails you're never going to read again.

·      Unsubscribe from those recurring emails you never read.

·      Use folders and categories to keep your inbox organized. Use labels such as Action Items, Reference, Waiting, and Archives. If you have no problem keeping on top of your folders – particularly those labeled Action and Waiting – use them as your daily to-do list.

·      Have your mail automatically sorted into particular folders as soon as it comes in. 

·      Make use of a helpful app such as Boomerang for Gmail. With Boomerang, you can draft an email and then schedule it to go out later. You can "boomerang" a message out of your inbox and have it return later when you actually need to address it. You can also receive a reminder if you haven't received a reply from a recipient after X number of days.

4.    Use Your Calendar Wisely

Choose the kind of calendar that works best for you - on your computer, on your phone, or the old fashioned way - on paper. Better yet, use a calendar that you can access on your desktop and on all of your devices. Immediately transfer any appointments you quickly jot down on paper on to your calendar. You could also use your calendar to schedule specific times to complete a task or a project. 

Most electronic calendars also allow you to create several overlapping calendars, e.g., a personal and a work calendar. This is a helpful feature to avoid double-booking yourself. Some people like to have a planning calendar. When there's an event you might attend, or if you're going back and forth with someone to schedule an appointment, you put it on your plan calendar. So they look tentative in your schedule, assign a light color to your plan calendar appointments. When plans firm up, you can transfer them to your work or personal calendar.

5.    Make Your Meetings More Productive

Every leader knows how hard it is to get anything else done when spending most of the day in meetings. When you head up a meeting, make it more productive and efficient right off the bat by clarifying the meeting's goals and objectives from the outset. Before heading to the conference room, ask yourself the following questions:

·      What am I looking to achieve?

·      What do I want agreement on? 

·      How can I best get a list of action items?

6.    Book Meetings for Less Time

Just like household items expand to fill a larger house, meetings tend to stretch out to fill up the available time. If there's a sense of time constraint because of a shorter meeting time, people are more likely to get to the meat of the matter and wrap up their points more quickly. Remember, when the meeting ends and attendees still have questions or concerns, you can always sit down with them individually or schedule a follow-up meeting.

7.    Schedule All Your Meetings Back-to-Back

It's harder to concentrate on other things when you're anticipating your next meeting. You're less likely to be at your best if you frequently have to interrupt what you are doing. So, if you can, set up all your meetings back-to-back. This way, the rest of your day won't be broken up by another conference. 

Time Management for Leaders: Final Thoughts

There's a lot of time-saving advice on time management for leaders out there. Please remember that what works for others might not feel right for you. So, don't feel guilty if you abandon a strategy that doesn't suit your personality or needs. If you find that you are struggling with time management, let Shaping Development help you manage your time. It’s worth your time to book a consultation with us to see how we can assist.

How a Task Analysis Can Transform Your Life

Picture the following scene.  You are ready for lunch and all you can think about is making a grilled cheese sandwich.  What are all the steps involved in that process?  

1) Locate the bread

2) Locate the cheese and butter

3) Open the bread and take out two slices

4) Spread the butter on both sides

5) Put the cheese on the bread

6) Put the pieces of bread and cheese together, etc.

...well you get the idea. 

In behavior analysis, this process is called a task analysis--and it can transform your life.

When teaching children, we often use task analyses to teach daily living skills such as brushing teeth or handwashing, but most behavior chains (skills that involve multiple behaviors) can be broken down into a task analysis.  This includes organizational behaviors such as standard operating procedures, as well as executive functioning skills such as decision making and problem solving. 

So how can this transform your life?  The biggest way a task analysis can transform your life is by combating that overwhelming feeling you have when you have a large project, or a goal for skill acquisition that you need to shape in a client or staff member.  By breaking the large skill or project into a sequence, a task analysis can help you focus on one step at a time and organize the process.  By breaking it down into small component parts, you can also collect more accurate data to measure skill acquisition, thus giving you information on the specific steps you need to focus on, as opposed to having to focus on the whole large process.

Have a strategy to share on how task analyses have transformed your life?  Comment below!

Want more ideas on skills you can focus on for a task analysis?  Check out our ebooks!

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Three Strategies to Organize Your Workflow

This last week I have been working through David Allen's book, "Getting Things Done,"* and it has really helped me to organize my workflow.  Three strategies he discusses in this book are to 1) Capture the Things that Might Need to Get Done, 2) Direct Yourself to Make Front End Decisions, and 3) Curating and Coordinating the Content.  How do I know it helped? I took a count of the tasks per day I completed.  Prior to reading this book, I was completing an average 2 tasks per day.  Last week, as I worked through the book, I completed 6 tasks per day, and also freed up some of my time to focus on strategy for my business by utilizing the methods outlined below.  

1) Capture the Things That Need to Get Done

In his book, Allen talks about the necessity of having a place to write down your task list, so that you can "close the loop" in your head and you are not focusing on your to-do list.  He explains that if things are not written down, there will be an internal "open loop" and you will continue to focus on those tasks.  By writing them down, you can effectively get them out of your head, leaving you to focus on the next strategy.  My own strategy in doing this week, has been to use my phone's task list to write down all of the tasks that need to be completed this week, along with alert reminders and due dates.  After they were written down, and my mind started to focus on those tasks, I redirected my mind to "close the loop," since it was written down with reminder alerts.

2) Making Decisions on Tasks

Once you have effectively captured the task, now it comes to prioritization of those tasks.  Some tasks will be "low hanging fruit" that you can get done in the moment and be done with it, while others will require more thought and time, or will require delegation.  See last week's blog on "How to Get Tasks Done Using Behavior Momentum" for more strategies on this step.  I went through each task per day at the start of my day to make decisions on each one as far as the order of accomplishment.

3) Curating and Coordinating the Content

For this strategy, I focused on taking those reminders and tasks on my phone, and using my calendar to block off time in the week to complete those tasks.  This way, instead of of having short blocks of time to complete tasks, I was able to block off time in a way that would allow me to be more productive and focus on my workflow.  Part of this strategy also involves committing to the calendar you set, and learning to say no to activities that would interfere with your time you've blocked off to complete tasks.

Often, our tasks build up and they can seem overwhelming.  By using the strategies outlined above, we can effectively free some time to accomplish the things we want to do, instead of being bogged down by our workflow.

*Please Note: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. 

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