Let’s wrap up my series about effective communication with emails! Previously, we touched on chats and calls. Emails came last because I barely write emails these days. Day-to-day communication with coworkers tends to happen over chat and, in my role, external communication is very limited.

What are emails still useful for then?

Usually, external communications happens over emails, with a provider or a customer, because they cannot easily access chats. But working in a rather large company often means less exposure to those interactions.

Corporate communications are often sent as emails too. These are one-way, just information to absorb and they normally don’t mandate any answers.

In the end, 90% of my emails act as a notification inbox for me. I receive emails when merge requests are created, tickets are assigned, documentation is written, and for all the subsequent interactions (follow-up comments). Even issues reported by users primarily happen over a ticketing system.

This is why my one and main advice to manage your emails is to embrace the Inbox Zero method. Simply said my inbox works as a to-do list, and what is present should be dealt with. So every incoming email is read and processed:

  • Is it just information that I need to read? Can I read it now and move on?
  • Does the email require an action from me? Can I do it now?
  • Anything that cannot be dealt with immediately stays in the inbox, otherwise, it is either deleted or archived.

As with a to-do list, for it to be helpful, it must stay short. Hence, actively trying to keep the inbox empty most of the time. For work items that I want to keep an eye on, or items blocked on something out of my control, the snooze feature is quite useful, to just make it reappear automatically later in time.

The same way you don’t want to clutter your desk with a mess, you probably don’t want to stare at an inbox filled with hundreds of unread emails. This also applies to chats: use unread messages or the save for later feature for work to be done. You may not have to listen to all the chatter in the office, but you probably want to reply to people talking to you, as you would do in face-to-face interactions.

One final tip: be aggressive about filtering out unwanted emails. Unsubscribe for that email list you never read, configure notifications for that tool that is very noisy, add an email filter when tuning is not an option.