Email Management: Forget the “touch it once” Rule!

So many of us have so many items on our to-do lists, it can be a source of stress to just about everyone! We need more minutes in the day… How will we get it all done?

Well, first of all, we need to give ourselves permission to not get it all done. Instead we need to look at setting the right priorities, and working on the most important stuff. That, in and of itself, is a subject that would take much more than this column to solve. Instead, let’s start small with a suggestion that may add a few minutes to each of your days.

Here is one little piece of time management that may help save each and every one of us several minutes each hour. Yet, you guessed it — how to process your in – bin. Whether you are in business or not, everyone has the equivalent of an in-bin. This is where information and work comes to you. It can be in the form of a mailbox, e-mail, work assigned to you, stuff dropped on your desk. We all have to process that “stuff.”

One of the theories of time management, and managing your in bin, is to touch the item only once. I think that is a bunch of “hooey.” I have tried it for years, and it just doesn’t work for me. Here is my alternative suggestion:

Touch each item no more than twice!

Here is the scenario. You receive mail or e-mail. You review it. Then you have to decide what you’re going to do with it. If you subscribe to the process of touching it only once, you can really get bogged down in non-important items that may take a long time to read or handle. Instead, I like to suggest that you touch each item no more than twice, with one exception. (We’ll get back to that later. ) When you review the item, you determine how important it is, and you move it to a file or a place that gets it off your desk, or out of your e-mail, yet it is held in a place where you can find it and not ignore it. After you have reviewed all your work and slotted these items in their appropriate holding places, then you go about setting the priorities and working on the most important items.

The exception to this is to give yourself permission to handle anything that will take you less than two minutes to handle. In other words if you open an e-mail, and you know you can handle it briefly by sending a quick response, or faxing a form quickly, my suggestion is that you do it, regardless of its urgency or importance.

So, let’s get back to all that other work that you estimated would take more than two minutes to handle. What do you do with it? The first question you ask yourself is is it worth keeping or trashing. Trash as much stuff as you don’t need — it creates clutter. Once you have decided that it is not trash, then you need to decide on whether you need to take action, and what type of action, its priority, and whether it is urgent or not. You can set up files for this both for paper, and for e-mail. Whatever you do, get all that stuff out of your inbox.

When you go to your mailbox, do you review your mail, and then put your mail back in to the US Post Office mailbox? No! We should all try to break our habits of leaving things in our inbox, and instead putting the information in places where we will ultimately take action. Examples of some files might be “Action Priority,” “Action — Not Urgent,” “Read,” “Pending.” You might also create files for specific projects you’re working on. It’s also a good idea to have your paper files mirror your electronic files.

Another important piece to all this is to avoid looking at your e-mail 20 times a day, and choose a few times a day to work on your e-mail. The US Postal Service delivers mail only once, doesn’t it? By doing this, you are taking the reins, and controlling your work, rather than having it control you.

The real challenge is in deciding the priorities for these various items, and that is a subject for another day. If you give yourselves permission to touch each item twice, before you start actually working on it, I believe you will be able to find a few extra precious minutes each day. They really add up!