Declare Bankruptcy

If you have ten thousand e-mails in your in-box right now and dream of one day having enough time to sit around filing them, I need to gently burst your bubble. You will never have enough time to file the e-mail. Ever. And if you did, I would advise you to find something more interesting to do! Right now, please turn on your computer and drag every single thing that's older than one month over to a folder called “Bankruptcy.” It's not deleted, so don't panic, but it is out of your way.

Sync Successfully

We want to be sure you are not double processing your e-mail by checking it on your phone before meetings and then having to check again at your computer later in the day. If you do check often on your phone, make sure that when you delete items, they also delete from your server. Get those gadgets on the same page.

Disable Pop-Ups, Beeps, and Buzzers

It happens to all of us. You are in a face-to-face meeting or on a conference call, and out of the corner of your eye, you see that floating bubble with a subject line dash across the bottom of your screen. Or the table buzzes. Or your pocket beeps. You get distracted and lose focus on the meeting. But you can't respond to the e-mail, either. So you're neither here nor there. Turn ’em off.

Get a Watch, and an Alarm Clock, for That Matter!

Admit it. Do you cuddle up with your smartphone before bed? Is it the first thing you glance at in the morning as you rub sleep out of your eyes? As Nick Bilton (2014) explains in his New York Times blog post, “Sleep researchers say that looking at a blue light, which is produced by smartphone and tablet screens, sets off brain receptors that are designed to keep us awake and interferes with circadian sleep patterns.”

Even if you only use your phone as an alarm clock, I suggest getting the phone out of your bedroom so that you can sleep better, set your own priorities, and be efficient. And for all the same reasons, consider resurrecting the watch. Many of us peek at our smartphones to check the time and inadvertently get distracted by incoming e-mails, texts, or Facebook alerts.

Set Up an Efficient Signature

How many times have you had to ask someone for the best phone number to reach them? Let's get more efficient by ensuring your e-mail signature lists your phone number. Better yet, make your e-mail signature say, “For all phone calls, dial this phone number!” Or write, “Please refer to my e-mail signature for the best number to reach me.” Or provide the contact info for your assistant.

Jail the Junk

Ever order anything online? Sign up for e-mail alerts or digests? Consider setting up a separate account for the “junk” to funnel into. This means you will not have to dig through paperless post promotions, Gap sales, or reminders from your realtor when you're trying to focus on your most important priorities.

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Auto Respond Wisely

A good out-of-office message can go a long way toward protecting your time and focus. In figure 11.1, I like how Jon Schwartz, a vice president of finance at Achievement First, lets people know

• The time frame he will be out of office
• How to reach him in an emergency
• Whom to contact in his absence

You can pre-populate your auto responders so you do not have to rewrite one each time you are out. Additionally, some organizations have norms around how much detail to provide, how often to post an out-of-office message, and more. If you are not sure what to do, ask! If you are the one who should spell these things out, take the time to get clear.

Okay, feel better? Now we can really get started.

Use Clear Subject Lines

Most leaders get upwards of one hundred e-mails per day from a wide variety of people. If you need to triage your in-box, getting others to write to you with clear subject lines is key. Here are a few recommended subject lines:

• FYI Only
• Action Requested
• QQ (Quick Question)

You can't control the e-mails you receive from outside funders, vendors, or other constituents. However, you can model the type of reply you want to receive, and if it is someone you are paying for services, such as a search firm, you could express a preference with a strong rationale. I don't want people to think you are being picky, but I do want them to see how you're trying to be as effective as possible. On your own team, however, there is no reason you cannot have a simple conversation about subject lines to get everyone on the same page!

Use Clear Salutations with To: and CC

I'm glad you caught this. Yes, the formal old-fashioned salutation may feel funny in an e-mail, but let me tell you, it makes you really consider what you write. At first, I was put off by the e-mail formality at my former employer, Achievement First, but over time I came to appreciate it for many reasons. It was always clear who was the recipient of the e-mail and who was only copied. You knew without guessing if you were supposed to reply, take action, or just listen in.

Let's refer to the example looked at previously.

See how it says, “Hi, Budget Team! (FYI Sarah)”? This enables Maia to signal a few things to Sarah:

• That the task was completed by Maia (therefore Sarah can cross it off her psychic To-Do List)
• That the budget team is on the hook for the reply

Try it. I even do it with my personal e-mails now!

There are other methods to keep folks in the loop without using CC:

• Save the info for an upcoming standing meeting. Use your Thought Catchers. Hint, hint.
• Forward the e-mail to the other people who need to be in the know. Take the extra step of changing the subject line so they know it is FYI only.
• BCC (blind carbon copy): This is a potentially dangerous feature of e-mail, because it makes it hard to keep track of who knows what and who is supposed to know what. Try to avoid the BCC except to proactively remove someone from an e-mail chain. For example, when people e-mailed me and my former boss, the co-CEO of Achievement First, I would reply to the sender to save my boss an e-mail. In the salutation, I'd say, “Dear Jim (FYI Dacia, I'm moving you to BCC to take you off the chain).” That way, Dacia knew I was on top of it, but wouldn't be burdened by the back-and-forth responses. Because she'd been BCC'd, she would not receive Jim's reply.

Clear Up the Prose

Half the people in the world care about context and the other half does not give a flying fig newton. Most people read e-mail just to see what they have to do and by when.

I recommend you clearly put the action in the subject line and in the earlier part of the e-mail and move context to the bottom. Let's look at a before and after sample.

Great, you caught almost everything:

• Effective use of numbers and bullets
• Clear deadlines and rationale
• Leading with the action; context to follow
• Nondistracting use of pleasantries
• Signals to the recipient which steps in the happened previously and which steps are yet to come (“I will be sending your annual review by…”)

Although paying attention to your writing will not solve every e-mail challenge, it certainly can eliminate a lot of clarifying follow-up e-mails and enable people to move forward right away.

Format Matters: Bulleting, Bolding, and Spacing

Perhaps the biggest issue with my two bad e-mails to the budget team and to Helmer was how they were formatted. If you ever find yourself sending an e-mail with more than three lines of straight text, halt! No one wants to wade through that kind of density. Consider using bulleting, bolding, and spacing to get the reader's attention and help her parse out the information clearly.

Scan

Every time you check your e-mail, start with a scan of the subject lines to see what you need to prioritize. If your team has normed on communication expectations (more on this later in the chapter), subject lines should be clear enough to scan for red exclamation marks, same-day reply, or urgent messages. I recommend scanning for any places you see emergencies, when you may be holding up a process, or someone is a VIP and deserves immediate replies. For example, when I do an e-mail scan, I look for anything from my babysitter, husband, or coaching clients.

Trash

In my experience, you can truly trash 10 to 20 percent of your e-mail. Meaning delete. As in make go away forever. I promise you. Such as that all-call for bagels? Or the student dismissal notice? Delete, trash, delete, trash. See? Everything is okay!

Archive

Or file, or label, or whatever you want to call it. This is stuff you actually want to store in an organized fashion. Most leaders either have too few folders or too many folders. I want you to hit a middle ground of just a right amount of folders.

Jesse Rector, a dean at a Relay Graduate School of Education, was a classic case of too many, too rarely used folders. Jesse's folders were organized in Outlook's default alphabetical order (figure 11.2). Some were active folders, for projects currently in the works, such as Alia/Jesse Check-ins. Some were reference folders, such as Marshall Memo and HR. Regardless, this surplus of folders was sending him into an unnecessary tailspin about what, where, and when to file.

You are dying to see the “After” version, right? I won't hold it back any longer (figure 11.3).

Jesse reported, “I love the new filing system. It has really streamlined my e-mail. I am faithfully deleting and filing! This has saved me tons of time!”

Jesse created the following folders to get his in-box Together:

1. Processed. Eighty percent of your e-mail can probably go in this processed folder. The definition here is “stuff you are too scared to delete but is not worth your time to file.”
2. Upcoming Meetings. Here's where you put agendas and materials that people send you if they do not include them as part of the digital invitation. Then, when you have time blocked to prepare for a meeting, you scoot right over to this folder and pluck out the information you need!
3. Projects. Remember those old-fashioned file folders that used to live on your desk? I want you to create e-mail folders for your active projects. Jesse can scoot right over to these folders when he needs to work on a project in a protected work block. Once a project is over, you can move the whole project folder into processed.
4. Reference. This set of folders includes items Jesse may need to reference at some point, such as key HR e-mails or particular sets of research and surveys.
5. Travel. This is where Jesse dumps any e-mails related to travel that he is unable to enter into his calendar. So, if he received a flight confirmation number, it would go into his calendar. But if he received a longer agenda for an upcoming conference, he may just want to save it here for reference.

After this, we put the folders in the order in which Jesse most frequently used them. We did this by labeling them with a number. I wanted the folders Jesse referenced or used the most often at the top. The default order is alphabetical, which really doesn't make sense for most people.

Let's recap the e-mail situation in table 11.2. Roughly.

Respond

This one is easy. You are probably already good at it. Reply. Write clearly. Be the person to propose the next action!

Defer

This is the hardest step—deferral. This is what happens to e-mails you cannot immediately answer in one of your work blocks. You have a few choices here:

• Use the flag or star in your e-mail platform.
• Delegate the reply to someone else.
• Mark it as unread so you are guaranteed to return to it.
• Verbally dictate your reply and have your assistant draft it for you.
• Drag it into your Calendar (Outlook only).
• Turn it into an Outlook or Google Task.
• Use Boomerang or Outlook's delayed send to get the e-mail sent back to you at a time you know you are ready to deal with it.
• Leave it in your in-box—and write it on a To-Do List with a deadline.

Honestly, none of these options is foolproof. They each require some level of discipline and consistency.

Daily Habits

We want to first establish times of day when you check (and reply!) to e-mail. I cannot tell you how many times this should be, but in my experience working with leaders, I typically see that in disciplined organizations with clear communication norms, three to four checks per day suffice. Nothing explodes. This is when you do the STAR-D each time.

Communication Rules, Agreements, Norms, or Whatever You Want to Call Them

At some point in an organization's life cycle, whether a school, district, CMO, or nonprofit, you will need to establish some norms for communication. Now, as my old boss would say, “No one ever goes checking a PowerPoint for rules before sending an e-mail,” so I would encourage you to lead with an ethos before setting too many rules.

Let's take apart two good examples. As you review the samples, look for expectations, clarity, and rationale.

An Informal School Example

This example (figure 11.4) is from The MATCH Community Day School in Boston. Kate Carpenter Bernier, a school leader at MATCH, introduced this document at the beginning of the year during staff training, got suggestions for feedback, and then lived it alongside her staff.

What I like about this example from MATCH:

• The purpose of the agreements is clear.
• It spells out the various forms of communication the school uses and for what.
• It is more of an ethos than a set of rules.

A More Formal Nonprofit Example

The next example (figure 11.5) is from Education Pioneers, a national education nonprofit headquartered in Oakland, California. Please find a full version on my website (www.thetogethergroup.com). Unlike the example from The MATCH Community Day School, Education Pioneers has employees working out of multiple national locations, some from offices and some from home.

This is a much more formal sample but another one I really like for its overall clarity. Some of my favorite things:

• It spells out expectations for which type of communications to use when.
• It makes expectations for response time clear.
• It provides sample subject lines to use.

The key here is to remember why you may need to establish norms and how far you want to go—erring on the side of following principles over obeying exact orders. One organization, New Orleans College Prep, went so far as to turn off e-mail at 7 pm each night, but also implemented the use of Slack, a real-time chatter channel with different live threads, such as #joy, for ongoing communications.