5 Common Excuses for a Messy E-mail Inbox (and what I'd recommend instead: MS Outlook & Gmail users)

Hi everybody. Well, my crazy busy August has come to a close, and now I'm hoping to start making a whole bunch more of my YouTube videos again. And I had a fun idea while moving my eldest off to college out of state. Gave me some time to think about some new videos, and I thought about this one because I was sort of prompted by this by a question at one of my recent events, and it made me think, you know, all these excuses I hear about how people end up with a really messy, cluttered inbox and how you could maybe do something about it. So let's dive in and let me share with you my 5 key reasons people end up with messy inboxes and what I would do to fix those problems. Number 1, and, um, not following a SMART regimen. Uh, number 2, You gotta follow up with that person later. Leave it in your inbox so you remind yourself to follow up with that person later. Number 3, I'm really not sure what I need to do with this email. Number 4, I'm not sure where I want to put this email. And number 5, I'm not even sure if I need to keep this email. So these are 5 of the biggies. There's one more I'm going to save for the end, but I want to sort of walk you through my decision-making process on what I would do in each of these 5 situations. Actually, It is what I do in each of these 5 situations. Number 1, you are not following a SMART regimen. Now, if you are not familiar with me— whoa, let me move myself over here. If you are not familiar with my past work, you are new to this channel, you will not really know that I have been teaching for more than 15 years this whole concept of an efficient and intelligent decision triage method for incoming messages. And let me just sort of walk you through this real quick. The beginning of it is based on content that I learned originally from David Allen, who wrote the book Getting Things Done, the perennial bestseller in time management. And what he basically said, he sort of built on this historic a little productivity strategy called the One Touch Rule, which basically was, you know, something new comes in, you touch it once, you make a decision. Well, let's take this one step further. You get a new email. If you open it up, you just made a deal with yourself. You gotta make a decision. So, you know, this is the key thing is if you're gonna open a message, you sort of made a contract with yourself that you have to make a decision. Now we're gonna talk a little bit more in detail on some of the other 5 about that whole process. But let's just say you make a decision. What David Allen said you do is if it's quick, you do those ones now. Um, you know, and basically, you know, his philosophy was don't keep quick stuff for later because that stuff will stack up on you, which makes a lot of sense. So if you open an email, you decide what you need to do with it, and that email is something that you can handle quickly, why not just get it done? Get it done, then put it away or throw it away. Now, if it's something you can't get done right now, notice I give you the strategy: turn it into a task, put it on your task list, or maybe your calendar. Now, I've actually done some YouTube videos in the past for Outlook users and for Gmail users. I'll put those videos in the comments about how both of those tools, Outlook and Gmail, make it so super easy and quick to convert your emails into task or calendar or contact items. So I'll put a link to both the Outlook video and the recently redone Gmail video on how to do that. But if you keep watching this video, you're going to sort of see this process in my next few steps. And then once you've either got that email dealt with, you did it, or You added it to your task list or your calendar. Do you need it in your inbox anymore? And my argument is no. Then you only have two choices: either file it or you delete it. Now we're gonna have a little nuance to that a little bit later, because maybe before you file it, depending on whether you're using Outlook or Gmail, maybe you should label it first to make it easier to find so that you can find that email later if it's not where you thought you put it and you need to keep it. That all make sense? Put it away or throw it away. And if you don't have a good place to put it away, well, make one and put it there. Make a folder and put it in the folder. All right, so now this is sort of the overriding structure of what I recommend you do with your typical messages. And obviously, if you followed what's on the screen right now with every new email that comes in, 90% plus are going to be out of your inbox in a matter of a minute or less. Now that doesn't mean the work's done. The work is now in your task list or your calendar, except for the ones that you did right now. Does that make sense? So get the work out of your inbox. Don't leave work in your inbox. Either get it done or get it on your task list or calendar, then go to your task list or calendar when you need to get the work done. Then you can prioritize and choose the best use of your time. Hey, good ideas. So follow this regimen. But wait, there's more. What about when you need to follow up later? Well, wait, I'm leaving. I hear this so often. Randy Dean, the reason that email's in my inbox is because I gotta follow up with this person later on, and I don't want to forget to follow up with this person in a day or two or three. That's a task, isn't it? You gotta follow up with that person in one or two or three days. So put that right on your task list. Let me show you what I mean. You could do this. Let's go into Microsoft Outlook. I have this test email to show you how to do conversions. I use this in my programs all the time, but this time I'm gonna say I need to follow up with this Randy guy. Watch what I'm gonna do. I'm going to left-click on this email, Outlook users, And I'm just going to drag it right down here to Tasks and drop it. Now what that does is it creates a brand new task based off the email. It even brings over the text of the email and the person's contact information. But the task is this: follow— oops, I can spell— follow up with Randy Dean by Wednesday. And then what you could do is you put it on Wednesday. Category: Business. These are the labels, by the way. We'll talk about those more in a minute. How long did that take? But see, now you don't have to leave that email in your inbox because now you've got a task that's in your task list that even has access to the email and the person's contact information right there. So you could move the email out of your inbox now. Now wait, one more little thing. Let's say You want to really make sure you follow up with this person. Well, turn on a reminder that's going to pop up Wednesday, and you can even set the time of day at 10 AM. Isn't that better than just leaving it in your inbox and hoping you'll see it on Wednesday? I think it's better. Okay, now I'm not going to actually put this on my task list because this is an academic pursuit, but I got one more for you. Maybe you need to follow up with Randy Dean by Wednesday at 10 AM. Well, why not do this then? Click on this email, hold the click, that's a left click, hold the click, drag it to calendar, drop it. That creates a brand new calendar item. And then you can come up here and say, follow Randy Dean by 10 AM. Now I know what I would do in this situation. I would put this on my calendar for Wednesday but not at 10 AM. I'd put it at 9 or 9:30 AM because if I'm following up at 10 AM and I couldn't find Randy Dean, I'm already late. So I would probably put this one in like an hour before so that way I have a couple chances to try to reach out and get a hold of this person before the actual deadline at 10. Oh, by the way, yeah, if you're wondering, yes, the email and contact information still down here. Right from the email into the calendar item. You know, if you wanted, you could even come up here and invite Randy Dean to the same meeting. So now he can be part of the meeting at 9 AM for your follow-up at 10 AM. Makes sense. Okay, now I'm not going to put this one on my calendar either because I'm showing you what I'm doing here, but You know, by the way, one little thing. If you wanted, you could even make sure Randy's in your contact database by left-click, hold, drag, drop people. And then take a look what that does. That makes a new contact item, puts in name and email for you automatically. Then you can come grab some stuff out of here, out of the signature, and build the entire contact. I mean, it's this easy. Just highlight, move. Super easy. Contact created. Now I'm not going to save this contact either because I know I'm already in my database, but that's sort of what I recommend that you do in Outlook. If somebody got to follow up with later, turn it into a task or a calendar item so you'll follow up with that person at the appropriate time. Now some of you are probably using Gmail and you're, well, does that work in Gmail? Well, let's take a look at something here. Look, there's that same email. Now notice over here down the side Calendar, Notes— that's Google Keep— Tasks, and Contacts. Well, let me show you something right here. I'm going to go to Tasks in Google, and now I can— it's loading, it's loading, it's loaded— now I can take the same email. Watch this. You can do the same drag and drop thing like I showed you in Outlook, and what will happen is it's going to make the new task, but your task once again Follow— I can spell— Up with Randy Dean by Wednesday. That's how I always say it when I'm typing it so I spell it right. Wednesday. And date/time, once again, you can put it on Wednesday. It's that easy. Oh, by the way, take a look at this. There's a link that if I click on the link, It'll take me right back to the email. Ah, cool. But wait, Randy, what if I actually want to put this email and turn it into a calendar item for Wednesday to remind myself to bug Randy then? Well, that's easy. Once you have the email open, see the ellipses up here, the three little dots? Click on the ellipses, create event, which makes a new calendar item out of the email, just like I showed you in Outlook. Follow up with Randy Dean. That easy. And then you just got to set date and time. Wednesday at— how did I do that earlier? 9 AM, I think it was. There we go. Easy peasy. Oh, and if you're wondering, yes, take a look at the bottom. Text the email and contact information right in this Google Calendar item. Now, like I said, I'm not going to save this because frankly, uh, that one doesn't make any sense to be added to my calendar. So I'm going to leave that site and come back to my original. Um, if you're curious, by the way, yes, you can actually add somebody into your contacts. Just hover over their name and it'll bring up— if they're already in there, to bring up their contact information. If it doesn't, it won't have the edit pen, it will instead have a little icon of a person with a plus, and you can add them to your contacts right here, Gmail users. So wait a minute, did I just show you— hold on, hold on, let's go back a slide— that in both Outlook and Gmail, you can very quickly and efficiently convert emails into task items, calendar items, even meeting invites and contact items in both platforms. Do you see why you don't need to leave them in your inbox or mark them with a flag or mark them unread and leave them in your inbox creating a mess in your inbox? Because move the work that you can't get done right now into your task list or calendar and just make sure that it's easy. That, you know, the thing you need to do is just follow up or have them follow up with you. That's a task. Now wait, there's more. Let's go to this one. By the way, you did the follow-up later. What about this? Not quite sure what to do with it. I've had— I actually had a really funny one happen related to this. So I'm speaking at a university training program, and I actually had some faculty members in the room, and I just walked them through the whole process. And, you know, I said, yeah, you open it up, you make a decision. If it's If it's quick, you handle it now. If it's not a quick task or calendar, once done or task, file or delete. No place to file, make a place to file, put it there. Easy peasy. One of the faculty members goes, oh, Mr. Dean, au contraire. Sometimes you can't just process your messages that way. Sometimes you need to ponder your messages. You've got to think about the message before you can either turn it into a task or calendar item or act upon it. You need some time to think. And I sat there for a second, looked at him and go, that's the task. He goes, it is? I go, yeah, the task is to ponder. The task is to think about it. That's the task. You just identified the task. And think about this, you could do this, watch. I mean, I just want to make this clear. I'm not quite sure what to do with this email, so what I'm going to do is come over here and drop it on my calendar and say— actually, I'm going to put it in this Ponder response and put it on my calendar for tomorrow morning at, you know, 8 AM. So now it's on my calendar to think about this email. Hopefully it won't take an hour. I might want to shorten that up to half an hour. Think about the message on your calendar. Now you're going to look at it and you can ponder the message, and the message is right there like I showed you. Or you could just do the easy thing, which is take it and drag it to Tasks, you know, for, you know, a day or two. Think about appropriate Response. Now this one might be good to put in your task list if you— if the response that you're thinking about right now is making you angry. Never send a hot email. Think about it first and maybe let yourself some time to cool down. I'm going to keep this one till tomorrow so I don't ruin my relationships. And yeah, can you do the same thing using what we just showed you in Gmail? Absolutely. You can drag and drop to make it a task in your Google task list. You can open up the message, go up to the ellipses at the top, and create an event to make it a reminder in your calendar. So, you know, these— it's okay to have to think about it. It's okay to make that your task. The task is to deeply consider this item. And for high-risk type stuff with high consequence, That's exactly what you want to do is don't hurry, take some time, think about it, but you still don't need to leave it in your inbox. Block the time, make the task, then you can put the email away. Now wait a minute, let's go back to this though. Okay, so we're not quite sure what to do with it. What about this one? Randy, I don't know where to put it. This thing could go into several folders. I mean, this email I'm working on, it's related to the main project I'm working on, the subproject I'm working on. It's related to one of my key clients. I've got a vendor involved in my coworker Bill's involved too. It could go into any of those folders. I guess I'll just leave it in my inbox. I had so many people tell me that's why they leave them in their inbox, because they're afraid to put it in a folder because it might not be in the folder where they thought they put it before they put it there. Well, now I want you to think about something here. If you've been using Gmail for a while, I want to show you something. You don't even have to make that choice. Let's go back to my inbox here. Now notice I've got this one tagged already in a couple different places. If I click the checkbox right here in Gmail, you'll notice that it gives me an option to either move it to a folder or label it. Now let me explain something here about this. If I hit labels, I'm going to turn off Anna Sacher automated messages. I'm going to hit apply. Now it's clear, has no labels on it whatsoever. But now I want you to look at the labels in Gmail. Anna Sacher, automated messages, speaker match, taming email webinar. Now look at the folders in Gmail. Anna Sacher, automated message, speaker match, taming email webinar. By the way, these are my folders and my labels. If you're looking at yours and my folders don't say that, well, of course they don't. They're not your labels or folders. These are mine. But if you take a look, you'll see that the same exact names For folders are in labels, and for labels are in folders. Now, if you've been using Outlook for years and you started using Gmail a little while ago, you're going to stare at this for a while. What are they doing? But if you think about it, it's pretty genius what they've done. Let me show you what I mean. If I hit Anna Soccer, speaker match, Taming Email Webinar, and I hit Apply under the label option, It adds all those labels. But now listen closely, Gmail users. If I then come up here and hit Archive after adding the labels, this email will be in each of these 3 folders. One email in 3 different folders at the same time. That's the power of the cloud. See, I don't have to move it in just one. I can put it in all 3, or like I made the example earlier, all 5. I don't have to choose. Gmail lets me put it in all 5 at the same time, one message, same message, by using labels and then archiving. Rewind and watch this like 4 times if that did not all make sense, because the first time I looked at it, I was like, what are they doing? And I literally sat there for 2 10, 15, 20 minutes, and I went, oh, that's brilliant. But it took me a few minutes because I came from the linear Microsoft Outlook world. Now, if you're using Outlook, it's not quite that slick. They do something a little bit different. By the way, um, I got two videos that you're going to want to take a look at here. Uh, one— I'll put these obviously in the descriptions— um, one is how to use these categories, and I give you a whole bunch of tips on how to use categories in Microsoft Outlook. The other one is how do you build and set up your folders. I'll put that one in here. That one's for both Outlook and Gmail users. And, you know, there's a third one that you might find of interest, which is how to, you know, the things you can do when you right-click on a message. I sort of talk about my favorite options here. All right, so take a look at all three of those videos. I will give you the link But what I want to show you is this: Categories is how Microsoft uses the labels or makes the labels. And if you click on here, or notice this, if you do a right-click on here and go to Categories, in both places you can come down here and hit All Categories, which brings up your Category Wizard. Now, if you haven't used your categories yet, it's going to say Red Category, Green Category, Blue Category, Tan Category, Gray Category, Purple Category. That's what it's going to say right there. But you can click on any one of these, come over here, rename it to your key projects, clients, customers, vendors, coworkers— oh wait, that sounds familiar. And what you can do is you can make labels for all of those different items. And then what you can do is you can select client and customer and, uh, say that's vendor. And, you know, let's see, coworker. There we go. Now I'm gonna hit OK, and it just added all of those as labels onto this message. Now in Microsoft, you actually do need to move the email into a single folder. You can't put it in all 5 like I showed you in Gmail. However, if you've labeled it before you put it in your specified folder you can then, if come up here, if you go back to find it's not where you thought you put it, do a search. And I want to show you something here. If you search, you can actually come over here to the side, click in this little gray area, and search by category. By the way, I also did a YouTube video about how to use the new search tool that they moved from down here to up here. You can watch that video too. So basically you're getting a whole— you watch all these videos, you're going to sort of be self-trained. Um, but the thing is, is now you could search category by a certain category, all Outlook items. You're going to find the message, so you don't need to leave it in your inbox so you can find it later. Because if you leave it in your inbox with a whole bunch of other messages, you're going to make it really hard to find your message. Label them, then put them away. In either the Gmail way using actual labels, then archive, or the Outlook way by adding categories and then filing and then using search. Wait, there's one more. I'm not even sure if I need to keep this thing. Let me show you an idea I have for that. Oh, why is that in your— well, I'm not sure I need to keep it, so I'm going to I'll leave it here for a few days just in case. Well, if that's the only reason it's in your inbox, can I show you an idea? Could you make a folder called to delete? And if it's just there part-time, you're not sure, you just move it into to delete, pick it up and move it into it, or label it into to delete. Now here's the thing. You're not actually deleting it. You're just putting it in a folder labeled to delete. And then maybe you block 10 minutes on your calendar every Friday morning to go check your to delete folder to see if you can get rid of some of these messages. Now, you didn't really need them, or maybe you decide you do need some of them. You move those ones into a folder, possibly after labeling it. I hope you see what I'm trying to do here. I'm trying to have you think through all of these circumstances where you're leaving stuff in your inbox and ask yourself, might there be a better, more efficient way that is better organized? Because I think there is. I don't think you really need to leave any of these things in your inbox after opening them and running them through the process if you think it through. Through and you're aware of the capabilities within your software, both Outlook and Gmail. And honestly, you might be using a third-party software, see what they can do too. But I think you can triage these without getting yourself into this situation. Now there's one final one. What if, Randy Dean, the whole reason they're in my inbox, I get just so many, so many emails, I can't keep up. I always tell people that if you enact what we've talked about earlier in this video and you just figure out that you cannot keep up, it's a volume thing. You can have the most efficient system in the world, you're still going to drown because you're, you're in too much water. And, um, you know what, in that situation it may indicate something bigger. It's not your email, it's a job design issue. You've got too many inputs coming in and you cannot handle them in a reasonable amount of time for what they're paying for you to do. And if you realize that you might be in that situation after enacting these efficiency and organization techniques, I think it's time to track how many emails you're getting and how much time you're spending on them, and maybe tracking how many phone calls and voicemails and visitors and all that other stuff you're receiving too. Track the data. Don't just go to your boss and say, "I got too much. I can't keep up." Go in and say, "Listen, did you know that I'm getting 135 emails per day and each one takes me anywhere from 3 to 6 minutes to handle?" They might have no idea you're doing that much email, and if they have no idea that you're doing that much email, they might assume there's no problem. When they're wrong. And what would probably be best in that situation is either taking some of that work and moving it off to the side to somebody else, or possibly outsourcing it, or just realizing, wait, these certain messages, we just really shouldn't even be dealing with those. But you gotta get out from under the flood if you're gonna stay alive. Now, this is Really silly though, if you're in a situation where it hurts your business. You know, I actually ran into a person, uh, once who was a very highly paid sales professional with a high-ticket, high-margin item. I mean, the, the thing they were selling was usually in the thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars per, with a profit margin of a couple grand or more per order. And she couldn't keep up because she was getting too many emails from people interested in what her company was selling. And I'm like, are you kidding me? The answer's right here. You know the answer? They need more salespeople. That's a wonderfully good problem to have. She goes, yeah, they won't, they won't approve another salesperson. What? That's crazy. If I can spend a dollar to make 5, I'm spending every dollar I have. Make sure that it's really not a silly thing happening and make sure that senior management understands the situation. All right, I'm off my soapbox with that. It's time to finish this video. I hope that you found this useful. Hey, there I am, but I'm gonna put myself right here. Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert. I'd like to thank you for your time on today's video. If you'd like to find out more about me and my programs, including even some full-length online streaming and webinar program options, go check out my website, randaldean.com. Of course, if you like the video, please give it a like, consider subscribing to the channel, and make some comments. I'm hoping to make this a little bit more interactive, so please share your comments on this and my other videos. Remember, I'm going to put several video links in the comments of this video to give you a self-study training opportunity here, and I also have a whole series of little electronic PDFs on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Gmail usage, smartphone/tablet usage, and on and on, a whole bunch of technology and productivity related stuff. Um, if you'd like to just get some of these freebies from me, just send me an email, uh, randy@randaldean.com, and put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll give you a whole bunch of self-study stuff to hopefully really help you regain some efficiency, focus, and productivity. Thanks everybody, hope you had fun. Bye now.