Experiment #2: We Need Batches! (Day 2: Email)

Admittedly, I am a little insane when it comes to email. I have four separate accounts through Gmail alone, plus my work account. One of the Gmail accounts is something that I use rarely and is painless to manage. The work account is fine, but I do receive a lot of inessential email, there. I initially set up my other three Gmail accounts according to the following guidelines: professional, personal, and outside research. Now, things aren't so clear cut. Sometimes, I receive hundreds of emails per day in each account, mostly from work- or academic-related list serves. As a result, even with the tagging and prioritization features that Gmail offers, communications can get lost. Worse, I feel the need to constantly check and respond to email, even when it serves no purpose beyond maintaining my anxiety over the potential to miss something. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Here are the methods that I am using to tame the email beast.

Batch-check Email ONLY at Set Times

I was tired of feeling like I was "on call" all of the time, so the first thing that I did was to shut off email notifications on my phone. I still sync with Gmail periodically, to be sure that it doesn't take ages to update, but I am no longer running to check my phone every time I hear a familiar Ding!

Instead, I now check and respond to work email twice daily, for half an hour just before lunch and immediately after work has ended--which varies from day to day, due to rehearsals. I was also checking all of my other accounts during these times, but I'm going to cut back to checking personal email once per day, after dinner. I don't get a huge volume of personal messages, so this should be easy enough to manage.

Cut the Fat

I am in the process of eliminating all of the "clutter" email that arrives on a daily basis. Even though I love my academic list serves, not all of the messages hold the same interest, for me. Now when I check my accounts, I often delete these without reading them at all, and I feel no more guilty or unproductive than when I read everything. I have done the same thing with solicitation/advertising/coupon emails. It saves a ridiculous amount of time when you don't have to answer everything.

Also, I really need to reconsider and cut back on the volume of most of my emails, if at all possible. I always seem to fear missing important points, especially when emailing parents. Being more concise and more focused should help. If I do need to send an occasional, long email, I can work on them periodically, and then cut and paste the information into one email. Then, I can batch the information that I need to send, without constantly flooding someone else's inbox.

Automate, Archive, Trash

My goal for the day is to tweak my Gmail accounts so that the emails which come from academic list serves are automatically archived into folders/by label, so that they never see my inbox. Then, I can batch check them at the end of each week. Barring that, I think that I'm going to sign up for the daily digest version of each list for now--though I much prefer following individual conversations. I plan to do the same thing for emails that I routinely trash, one by tedious one. It will be much less cluttered if I can direct some of those emails into the Trash, and then go back to salvage only the ones that are of interest to me. I think that it will be much easier to see and deal with those emails that actually are a priority, and require my immediate attention. The best part is that Gmail will automatically delete the contents of my Trash Bin after thirty days. With the emails that are left, I hope to play around with the label coloring system and the recent addition of priority tabs, to create a more streamlined inbox.

Estimated Time Saved

If I only have to check and send email for 1 hour each day, I estimate that I could save 3-4 hours per week--assuming that I spend a total of 30 extra minutes, bit by bit, checking my email as it arrives. Learning to be more concise with my replies will help me to save all of this time, when used wisely.