notes-organization-emailTriage

A triaging system for email

There are three phases, phases A, B, and C. On average phase A usually happens multiple times a day, B happens every 2 or 3 days, and C happens a little less than once a week. However, if your inbox gets more than 20 or so emails, then try to do a Phase B ASAP and a Phase C as soon as you have time.

There are two folders; the inbox and the 'put aside' folder (i often have various folders to permanently save email to after i've read and responded to them, but that's not a part of this discussion).

This procedure discusses five operations on email:

Phase A

Scan headers and guess if anything requires an immediate response, and then glance at those emails and deal with them if necessary.

Phase B

Glance at each email in inbox. Deal immediately with every email meeting EITHER of the following criteria:

i. (urgent AND (work OR chore OR logistics))

OR

ii. the entire thread can be read and replied to in under 30 seconds

Put aside indefinitely every email meeting the following criterion: The entire thread does not require a response at all, and would require more than a few minutes to read or respond to

If at the end of phase B there are still too many emails remaining, then put almost all of them aside temporarily.

Phase C

C: Every few weeks or more often: do a Phase B, then for every remaining email, either:

At the end of a Phase C there should be almost zero items remaining in the inbox.

When you have time to: consider going thru the pile of emails that were put aside indefinitely

In Phase B and Phase C, the thresholds for triaging/putting emails aside vary depending on how full your inbox is.

How to get me to notice an urgent email

If you are sending me an very important email that requires an urgent response, put the Subject line in ALL CAPS. Then i'll notice it during my daily header scan. I only get a few of these per year.

Design principals

1) upper bound on number of items in inbox at any one time -- when it gets more than a page i usually do a phase B and C and put many of the remaining email aside

2) check email frequently for urgent stuff, but don't spend any time during these checks on non-urgent stuff

3) deal with urgent items needed action

4) deal with non-urgent items needing action within a week or so

5) don't let incoming emails control your time management: don't spend significant time on an email thread except when you would have budgeted this time for that topic anyways

6) read all emails eventually

Downsides:

History

It used to be that sometimes entire days would go by where i got nothing done but replying to emails, because i would spend all day on debates and 'interesting ideas' that weren't necessary for work, just because they came in the form of email; now i put these emails aside and only spend time on them during breaks.

After that, it used to be that urgent, mandatory emails, such as a friend who was trying to arrange a get-together, would get unnoticed or un-replied to for way too long, because going thru my email would take so long that i would put it going thru any email until i had free time.

So, the following triaging system is based on frequent, quick passes to make sure urgent, mandatory emails are dealt with.

This webpage was written in response to a friend's inquiry.

The description above is somewhat aspirational.

Links

Other systems: