How I work with email across Mac, iPhone, and iPad

“When it comes to producing value with your brain, the more you’re able to complete one thing at a time, sticking with a task until done before moving on to the next, the more efficiently and effectively you’ll work.” — Cal Newport

When the digital revolution happened, email was right at the heart of it. For the first time, mass communication was available in real-time and with very little effort.

Over thirty years later, our relationship with email has changed very little and this can mean all sorts of problems when we now operate in a world where digital communication in general has advanced so rapidly.

The problem with email

There are two types of communication: synchronous and asynchronous.

Synchronous is communication in real-time, like a telephone call. One person says something and you respond instantly. They then reply to you straight away … and so the communication continues
Asynchronous communication is not real-time. It’s communication that is meant to sit there for a while until the user responds at a later date.

Email was designed to be asynchronous, but too many people are expecting it to be (or are turning into) synchronous communication.

You see, email has that nasty habit of becoming the most important thing in the room. It tends to be one of only a handful of apps that are open all day which meant for me that from the moment the ‘ping’ sounded and the notification showed up in the top right-hand corner of my desktop (or a nice big red number showed up above the email icon on my phone), I was distracted from my work.

It’s just too tempting to see who deemed you important enough to mail you or what they wanted. It’s a killer for productivity.

I would usually stop what I was doing and switch over to my email app to see what the message was. The result was rarely worth the effort: often the result would result in another task on my to-do list, a useless message or (at the very least!) a struggle to get back to what I was doing

It’s hardly surprising that a study by the University of California, Irvine found:

A correlation between the time spent checking emails and the rising of an individual’s stress levels.
These new levels of stress resulted in the individual’s email responses being sent too quickly or containing “expressions of anger.”
This behaviour of being angry in emails contributed to stress and was said to have detrimental effects on an employee’s health.

I think we can probably all relate to that.

So what’s the solution?

For me, I found things improved when I forced email to be an asynchronous method of communication again by:

Only checking my emails three times a day.
Scheduling an hour entirely dedicated to responding to emails.

I only open my email app three times a day across desktop and mobile devices. The rest of the day, the app on my desktop remains closed with all notifications on my phone turned off as part of my “Work” Focus Mode.

The emails get checked:

In the morning: this is usually a quick five-minute check after I’ve dropped the kids off at school. The goal here is to see if anything urgent (and it has to be urgent) has come in overnight. If there’s something that really can’t wait, I’ll deal with it there and then. I’ll typically do this on my phone as I can scroll through the inbox quickly and a simple swipe to the left or right can delete the message or Pin it as something that needs following up.
After lunch: An hour after lunch is usually when I work through my emails on my Mac. It is typically a dedicated and focused task, meaning that I won’t have other apps open while I go through everything. I’ll respond to all relevant emails that have come in over the last 24 hours and confirm the timelines of any tasks that I’m being asked to carry out. Those tasks get added to my to-do list and will be completed when the email app has been shut down and I’m not distracted by more messages coming in.
Shut-down: At the end of each day I have a shut-down routine which I typically carry out at my desk on my Mac. As far as emails are concerned, this is similar to the morning check-in — I just want to ensure that I have replied to all emails that need a response. So, if anything else urgent has come in I can deal with it then. Otherwise, this is just a cursory glance to make sure nothing has fallen through the cracks.

How do I store email?

“There is a performative dimension to writing emails and cc’ing everybody, like ‘Look at all the work I’m doing.’ It’s annoying” — Cal Newport

A couple of years back, I realised two things:

Firstly, about half of the emails coming my way were useless to me. They were perhaps spam, for someone else (with me on cc) or long email chains that didn’t move the conversation on.
The nicely created folder structure that I spent ages building and carefully filing emails into was useless. If I needed to find an email, I just searched for it. I never manually went to a folder and looked for it there.

Today, when I go through my emails I take one of three options:

Relevant to me — I star/pin the email to ensure that it gets dealt with properly. By that I mean, any tasks are added to my task list or a reply is made to the sender. Once that has been done, I’ll archive the email
Archive — If an email needs no immediate action but is potentially relevant further down the line, I’ll archive it. No folder or anything — it just goes into the archive with everything else and I’ll rely on Search to find it if needed later on. This is particularly good for emails I’m just copied into.
Delete — If I’m getting spammed or receiving emails that are of no value, I’ll just delete them straight away.

What I learned

Whether people realise it or not, they respond to your email etiquette. If you respond quickly, they do the same. Replying quickly to an email does not always guarantee that you’re getting something off your plate: often a quick reply will result in something coming back to you twice as quickly.

However, by following the method above, I can ensure that all emails are responded to within 24 hours — and that is a time frame that everyone accepts. I’ve not had anyone chase me for a non-urgent email within 24 hours.

So play your part in training those people who email you. If you show that you tend to get back to emails within half an hour, people will continue to expect that so put your mental health and productivity first by laying the ground rules early.

People will respect the increased quality of your work that appears when you’re not distracted much more than they will an immediate email response.

The other major lesson is much simpler: don’t get involved in email tennis where your reply is just met with another reply which doesn’t advance the conversation at all.

We might now live in the 21st century but that’s still where phones come in. If you find you’re spending too long dealing with a subject over email, then pick up the phone. It’s almost guaranteed to move your conversations forward in less than five minutes!

One last thing

If you found the article above useful, then there are three things you can do to support my writing: