We've talked a lot about effectively triaging messages that require less than three minutes of our time. And for good reason: 87% of the messages we receive fit into that bucket.

It's also important to have a strategy in place for handling messages that require a lot of effort, though. It turns out that the roughly 12 messages we receive each day that need substantial work to address add almost 90 minutes to our workload! Today's material is a smorgasbord of techniques to help you make short work of the emails that require work.

Prioritization

The first step toward handling messages that require a lot of work is to keep them in perspective. Just because a message is next in your Inbox doesn't mean that it's the most important thing you need to be doing right now - so don't give it immediate attention.

1. When a message needs more than five minutes of sustained work, convert it to an item on the to-do list of your choice*
2. If you'll need the email to complete the task, and the task title isn't descriptive enough to locate the message with a search, add extra information to the task (like the sender of the original message)
3. If you estimate that the task will require more than 15 minutes to complete, add the first five minutes' worth of work to the to-do list entry#. For example, if an email comes in asking you to review a document, you could create a task titled "Review Document X (book a conference room; print Document X)" to indicate what you'll do to get started.
4. Archive the message

After you've populated your to-do list, reprioritize it based on the importance of each item. That way, both existing work and inbound work gets done in order of how valuable it is.

* We recommend Wunderlist if you need a standalone to-do list, or you can use the integrated task manager from your email provider (Google Tasks, Outlook Tasks, for instance - these have the advantage of linking the to-do entry with the message that prompted it).
# Thanks to David Allen for suggesting this effective technique

Make Explicit Decisions

Many messages are difficult to handle because they require making a decision, often with incomplete information. Closing doors and picking a course is hard - it exposes us to second-guessing and leaves us vulnerable if we guess wrong, even if we made the best decision possible with the information we had available. Deciding also makes us tired - as recent research shows, it depletes our willpower to make decisions.

We often wait to make decisions in hopes that we'll gain more information, but sometimes we wait to make decisions just so we don't have to make them, and there will be no more information forthcoming.

In those cases, we encourage quickly making the decision, then moving on. An explicit decision is more likely to be a good one than a decision born of inaction. Most decisions are not life-altering, so a satisfactory decision made immediately can often work out better than an optimal decision made after a long delay. With those principles in mind, consider:

1. Trust your instincts, but recognize that the choice that makes you uncomfortable is often the better one.
2. If you really can't decide, flip a coin. Most of the time, when the coin is in the air, you'll know which side you'll want to come up. If not, then you don't have enough information to decide, so you might as well go with the result.

Staying Focused

If you used The Email Game or our message timer from yesterday, you know that staying focused is one of the most difficult challenges of digital productivity. Here are a few of our favorite tricks for focusing and staying productive while working through a long list of important work.

• Set a timer for fifteen minutes, and commit to working on the most important task in your list for just that long. If those fifteen minutes don't come out well, you can stop and move on to something else. Most of the time, though, just getting started was the hardest part. -Alex
• Physically move around. Many times, the barrier to feeling productive is physical. Do some jumping jacks, or walk around the block, and get your blood flowing. -Moah
• Create a calendar appointment for long tasks that have been slipping. That way, you have a commitment to completing them, and a blocked-out window of time when you can focus on them. -Mike
• Get away from your computer to start a task that requires thought. Most of the RYI content has started out as ink on a piece of physical paper, then was transcribed later. -Alex
• Use music to raise your energy level. We find the Epic Soundtracks station on Pandora to be a nice blend between making work feel epic and minimizing the distraction that comes from having music play. Be careful, though, to turn off the music once you're in the zone if what you're working on requires a lot of thinking - research shows that having music on during high-cognition tasks slows you down!

Final Thoughts

Today, we talked about some techniques that help us effectively prioritize and conquer difficult emails. There's no silver bullet when it comes to having too much work, but these tactics will take you a long way.

At this point, we've covered all of the steps to overcoming email paralysis. We'll spend the next few days on writing better emails, faster.