Maintaining Inbox Zero: No Emails in Your Inbox

"Inbox Zero" was a dream that began to look realistic when I decided to separate my emails into tiers: Chatter notifications, Basecamp notifications and everything else. When Chatter notifications were all that I was seeing in my inbox, it was easy to empty my inbox on a daily basis. But the illusion of having responded to everything faded very quickly as the number of unread emails piled up in a separate folder lurking just beneath my inbox.

Finally, to dispel the illusion and to actually respond to all incoming email, I took control of my inbox by making one simple decision. That decision is simply to check my email just twice a day, once in the morning and again in the evening. And now I am able to consistently meet a 24-hour response time to emails during weekdays.

Implementing the decision required just a few major behavior changes:

• Schedule 90 mins per session to handle email. Time not used in a session can be reallocated to other activities.
• Spend no more than 6 mins responding to an email. If more time is required, flag the email for follow-up. As a courtesy, after flagging an email for follow-up, I generally reply to the sender to let him or her know that I have received the email and need more time to craft a full response.
• Once read or flagged, either move the email into another folder or delete it.

The point of this change was to increase productivity by reducing stress, anxiety and workplace distractions from two things: constantly switching into and out of Outlook, and worrying about unread emails.

If you try this or are already doing something similar, have you been able to maintain inbox zero? Or does your job demand a different way to handle email? While I am far from completing all of my tasks on a day-to-day basis, I take comfort in knowing that I can at least respond to all emails that come my way. After all, communication is a key component of everyone's work.

Tip: To follow through with eliminating email distractions, turn off email notifications in Outlook, on your tablet and on your smartphone.

Tip: The articles below may provide additional perspectives on handling email:

• Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload
• Empty your Inbox: Process and organize your email more efficiently
• Managing Email Effectively
• SXSW Killed My Inbox Zero: Email Lessons From The Front Lines Of Tech(sas)

Worktime expectations: giving and receiving feedback

It's hard for me to decide which is more difficult: giving or receiving feedback.  But since there are numerous benefits to doing both in the workplace, I believe we should reasonably expect an employee to participate on both sides of this activity.  The reason is simple.  An organization needs feedback at the organizational level, just as humans need feedback on an individual level.

Just think:  How well would you function if your stomach doesn't tell you when you're full?  Or if your ears don't relay the sound of a fast-approaching vehicle?  Or if your eyes don't show you where your hands are as you're threading a needle?

An organization is much the same.  We know in our minds that it's important to stay coordinated with our colleagues, and everyone seems to lament the fact that often the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing.  So, let's do something to connect our organizational senses.

Giving feedback is pretty straightforward:  After each significant engagement with another individual within the organization, provide some feedback to explain the good, the bad and the ugly.  The other individual can be anyone: a peer in your department, your manager, your direct report, a colleague in another part of the organization.

The challenges to meeting this straightforward expectation are mostly cultural.  Do you feel that your feedback is valued?  Are you afraid of giving feedback?  Do you know how to give feedback in a professional manner that gets the point across while avoiding personal attacks?  I believe it's a leader's job to remove these barriers to facilitate the critical flow of communications up, down and across an organization.

Receiving feedback is a bit more complicated, as two steps are involved.  First, you have to create a channel through which feedback is created.  Then, once feedback is received, you need to confirm receipt of the feedback and then act on it.

The appropriate action on feedback depends on whether the comment was positive or negative.  If feedback was positive, then continue doing whatever it was that merited the support.  If the feedback was negative, then adjust your behavior, explain your behavior or ask for further discussion of the comment.

The primary challenge to meeting this expectation is also cultural.  How much feedback are you able to take?  Positive feedback is always pleasant on the senses, but it's the negative feedback to which we need to pay the most attention.

After all, it's easier to adjust the oven temperature while baking than to salvage burnt cupcakes.

Worktime expectation: self-reflection

In trying to set performance goals with my staff, based on my worktime expectations of an ideal employee and our organization's mission and objectives, I received good feedback that the broad categories of my expectations are currently unclear at best.  So, I aim to explain each of them in a series of posts, starting with what I hope is the simplest category: self-reflection.

To me, self-reflection in the workplace is the solo act of reviewing and adjusting one's own behavior to better serve the organization's needs.  The process can be outlined in three simple steps:

1. Review your recent activities, assessing how productive and well-aligned they were.  Consider your own personal goals and the organization's goals in your assessment.
2. Make a short-term action plan, noting which activities to start doing, to stop doing and to still continue to do.
3. Execute your short-term action plan.

The length of the "short term" is up to the individual to decide, based on that person's individual capabilities and the time constraint set by leadership.  For example, take an employee with a short attention span who is expected to spend 2.5% of his time on self-reflection.  This employee may decide that "short term" equates to one week, which is just enough time for him to start losing focus on the action plan.

As implied, self-reflection is not a one-time process, but rather a habit that should be developed over time.  I searched on Google for "why is it important to self-reflect" and found a few useful resources that explain how the process helps in many situations:

• Real Talk blog: "Why Self Reflection Is Important"
• College of the Canyons: "Self-Awareness"
• DJUS Online: "Cognitive Effects of Self-Awareness on Thought"

And when would be good to start this process?  Well, how about today?

How to stop lying and start working on priorities

A quote from Mahatma Ghandi explains it well, "Action expresses priorities."  The "it" being how we regularly lie to everyone at work, including ourselves.

You may be thinking, what the __ are you talking about?  I always practice integrity in the workplace, and I would never lie to my colleagues.  Well, I happen to think the same!  But if you're like me, and you look back at a week's worth of work (facts) compared to everything you communicated (words), are you sure you haven't lied?  Do the facts really reflect your words?

Okay, okay.  Maybe saying "we" is too much.  Let's step back for a second, and let me explain how I lie.

Within the past week, I've frequently said to a colleague working on a project with me, "This project is a high priority."  Yet, when I sat down with the same colleague for our weekly check-in yesterday, I was forced to admit how little time I had actually devoted to the project.  And because I contributed very little to the "high priority", I questioned myself on whether it really was a high priority.  I would expect anyone else to ask me the same question.  And the sad truth is:  No, the project was apparently not a high priority to me.

When I looked back at my week, it turns out my real priorities were the following, in roughly this order: addressing real emergencies, addressing perceived emergencies, meeting to discuss non-priorities, reading and sending emails about non-priorities, talking to people about non-priorities.  Oh, and I almost forgot this one:  Telling people what my priorities and the organization's priorities are.

Does this sound familiar at all to you?  Regardless, the lying has to stop.  And for that, I'd like to share three ways to do this, which I will implement today for myself.

Write down your priorities and post them where you can see them.  If you care to listen, our director of IT will tell you about the list of personal goals on his refrigerator at home for him and his wife.  "Every day, we'd come home and ask each other, 'What did you do to advance one of your goals?'"  The question is asked with the best of intentions, to gently help each other remember what is truly important.  As the late Stephen R. Covey observed, "Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important."

Block time on your calendar to work on your priorities.  Blocking time off is easy:  Create an appointment on your calendar, and mark it as busy time.  Almost like magic, most non-priority meetings requests will be automatically deflected.

Work on your priorities in a place where distractions are minimized.  How can you be productive when you're being distracted every 5 minutes?  Shut the door to your office.  Or go setup a workspace in a remote corner of the office where only the cleaners visit.  Or work from a conference room (that you can reserve), from home or from a coffee shop.  And no matter what, always remember to turn off your office phone and close Outlook, Gmail or whatever email client you use.

What do you think?  What are your tips for getting the right work done?