Email is the scourge of just about everyone’s time and attention, at least those of us in the “laptop class” and the broader white-collar workforce. Some people’s jobs just are their inbox. But for academics, the inbox is the enemy. It’s a timesuck. It exerts a kind of gravitational pull on one’s mind and attention. It threatens to conquer every last second you might spend doing something else.
Here are some rules and practices I’ve instituted to manage my inbox.
No email on my phone. By this I mean not only that I lack the app, I also can’t log in on a browser. I literally do not, because I cannot, access my inbox (personal or professional) on my phone.
No email on the weekends. This rule’s looser, but I don’t reply or feel accountable to my inbox on the weekends. I mostly leave it be.
No email until lunchtime. Mornings in my house are harried swirls of chaos getting kids to school; I don’t check my inbox before leaving. When I get to my office, I pour some coffee, pray, then sit down in my recliner and read for 2-4 hours. My laptop remains closed and in my bag, barring an urgent matter or occasional need. I usually open it around 11:30am.
Inbox zero twice per day. While I munch on a salad, I take 15-30 minutes to whittle my emails down to zero. Two-thirds of this is deletion. For what remains, it’s a smattering of replies, archives, calendar notes, and snoozes. I do the same thing late afternoon, before I leave the office. Occasionally I’ll do it in the evening, at home, but I don’t plan on it.
Little to no email outside of normal working hours. I’m flexible on this one, but the rule is that I don’t make myself accountable to my inbox outside of the 8:00am–5:00pm range. If I receive an email then, it can wait till the next day. And if the inbox piles up outside of office hours, so be it.
As few newsletters as possible. I’ve slowly been unsubscribing from newsletters I read and transferring their feed to my RSS reader (I use Feedly). Some still come by email—I’m not sure how to pay for one without getting it via email!—but I either click on them immediately or skim and archive. I don’t want them just sitting there, cluttering up the place.
A quick brief reply is better than a delayed reply or non-reply. I still remember an email I sent to a distinguished academic in 2010. I was going to visit his campus to see if it might be a good fit for my doctoral studies. My email must have been a thousand words at least. His reply was a single incomplete sentence. Yes, he would meet with me. But it was so curt I thought he was mad. He wasn’t! He just didn’t have time to match my logorrhea. He had better things to do. And he was right. So when colleagues, students, or readers email me, I’ve trained myself to give them a speedy 1-2 sentence answer, even if it’s not as detailed as they’d like. Sometimes it’s just, “Let’s talk more in person,” or “I’ll have to think about that.” But if the question is concrete, I can typically answer in a single sentence. Brevity is preferable to silence!
Every personal email gets a reply. Except by mistake, I never ghost genuine emails from living human beings (unless, I suppose, there are living human beings behind A.I.-generated Ed Tech mass-mailers). Everyone who writes me by email receives a reply, full stop. That includes random readers of my work. Obviously I don’t have a sizable enough readership to make this infeasible; I assume Ken Follett can’t personally respond to every bit of fan mail he gets. But as long as it’s not unduly burdensome, I’m going to keep up this habit. And doubly so for emails from people I know, whether colleagues or friends or family. No email goes unanswered!
Every (initial) personal email gets a reply within 24 hours. This one might sound tough, but it’s really not. I’m a fast typist and I’m committed to being brief whenever possible. So once the spam and nonsense are out of the way, I reply until the inbox is clear. Then I do it again later that day (on workdays, that is). That way I stay up on it, and it doesn’t pile up to unmanageable levels. Sometimes, granted, I lack the time to do so, or I’m traveling, or an email is going to take up too much time for the length and thought required. So I email within the 24-hour period to say that I’ll be emailing tomorrow or later that week or once my midterm grading is done or after the holiday or after the semesters wraps up. That way I’m not leaving a correspondent hanging, even if I can’t get to them in a timely manner.
Strategic snoozing. The “snooze” button is your friend. It’s a great invention. Right now I have eight emails snoozed (and nothing in my inbox). Only two are emails I need to reply to. One is an ongoing correspondence about a paper I’ve given feedback on; the other will reappear in a couple weeks when I’m supposed to remind a colleague about something. So no one is waiting on me, exactly. Even when I’ve snoozed threads trying to find time to meet up for a meal or drinks, the person isn’t waiting on pins and needles; we both know it’s a busy time and we’ll figure something out in a month or two. Anything pressing has been dealt with; it’s the emails with longer deadline horizons, such as a recommendation letter request, or emails that function as self-reminders that call for strategic snoozing.
All this, I should say, is operative primarily during the academic calendar. I’m looser in the summer, for obvious reasons.
I should add as well that, unlike other techniques for tech management, I don’t feel constrained or stressed by these rules. They aren’t hard to keep. They’re shockingly easy, as a matter of fact. Not everyone is in similar circumstances, but something like these rules would work, I think, for most academics. Of perhaps all “laptop workers,” academics may be the most notorious for simply never returning emails, even important ones. It’s not that hard, folks! And rules like these actually keep you from being on email more. My average daily email time is 30-60 minutes. That’s doable. But I could stretch that out to just about anytime I’m in the office, if I kept my laptop open (or, when I’m writing, my email open). Were I to do that, then I’d see a new email demanding a reply every 10-20 minutes, in which case I’d never get around to anything else. It’s in service of getting around to other things—usually more important and always more interesting—that the rules are worth implementing and maintaining.
