Day 21: Sticking with the Program
The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry
March 27, 2012. Returning home from two relaxing weeks in the Bahamas, tanned and recharged, you open your laptop to a scene from a horror movie. Inbox: 1020.
July 10, 2012: The project you've been working on for the last year releases. You've spent the last 9 days responding to only the most urgent messages. You pull out your phone at the release party... Inbox: 750.
September 8th, 2012: Your first daughter is born! Congratulations! Wait, email, at a time like this?!? Seriously?!? Inbox: 600.
No matter how well a program is put together (and we hope this one earned an A+!) or how motivated you are, life eventually throws you off your routine. It's the universal reason that most exercise routines, diets, and, yes, productivity programs, don't work in the long run. Fortunately, the principles we've shared in Revive Your Inbox don't fall apart because a busy week came.
Today, we'll discuss what to do when something unexpected happens, and your email spirals out of control. Look for the steps that match your situation, and we'll help you get back on the wagon.
I'm going on Vacation! Prep Time: 15 min
If you're spending vacation tethered to your email, you're not having much of a vacation. Try to make sure that you don't have to check it, preferably at all, while you're away. Preparation is the key to keeping it under control while it goes untouched for a week or more.
- Set up a really good Out of Office Reply. See our Day 13 Content for our suggestions on what it should look like. To refresh your memory, it should include: Who to contact while you're away, how long you'll be away, and how disconnected you will be (checking infrequently, completely incommunicado).
- If you expect to get more than 1000 emails while away, consider acknowledging that in your Out of Office Reply, and setting expectations that you won't be replying to email. For instance: I am traveling and will return on 6/14. When I return, I will have thousands of emails backlogged, so I may not see this email for a long time, if at all. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. If this is urgent, please contact someoneelse@mycompany.com, or if it will still need my attention after I return, please email me again on or after 6/16 to ensure that I see it. Thank you from Japan!
- If you find it especially hard to disconnect, consider setting up a special email address for your vacation, which will be the only one you check while you're away, and ask for only the most urgent messages to be forwarded to it in your Out of Office Reply. Hat Tip: Josh Kopelman who set up this system using this automatic reply with the email address interruptmyvacation@company.com when he went on his last vacation.
- When you get back, try not to catch up on ALL of your email in a single-day death march. Instead, follow the steps for an overloaded inbox below, based on how much email you received.
I'm about to be REALLY busy at work Prep Time: 15 min
A period where you'll be at work, but know that you won't be able to stay on top of your email, calls for a similar set of tactics as for when you're going to be on vacation.
- Set up an Out of Office Reply that says you're overwhelmed right now. A good starting point might be: I am in the office, but I am behind on my email because of our work on finishing Project X, which is taking up all of my energy right now. If this is urgent, please call me at extension 1, or please email me after we finish the project on the 15th if you still need me and I haven't gotten back to you yet.
- When you get back, try not to catch up on ALL of your email in a single-day death march. Instead, follow the steps for an overloaded inbox below, based on how much email you received.
Help! I have 1000+ messages again! Recovery Time: 1 hr, +30min/day
- Archive all but the last few hundred messages in your inbox. It's email - people expect that messages will sometimes be lost. You will miss opportunities this way. But at least you've explicitly decided to miss opportunities that are weeks old, rather than missing opportunities that came in today because your email is a mess. If a message is of life-changing importance, the person sending it will contact you again.
- Follow the steps below for handling the few hundred messages that are left.
Help! I have 500+ messages again! Recovery Time: 30 min per day
- Stay on top of all your new email, using Day 9's Ultimate Email Workflow. Make sure that you don't end a day with more email than you started with.
- Divide the number of messages you have in your Inbox by the amount of time you want to spend catching up - we recommend 5 or 10 days. Commit to handling that many messages per day, in excess of the new mail you're receiving.
- Go through your old messages without trying to prioritize. If you leave yourself 100 messages that require action, and have already sorted the 400 messages that don't, you'll need to build up willpower for days to conquer the pile. You need to be able to keep your motivation boosted as you clean up the mess by deleting easy messages in stream.
- Go through your messages from newest to oldest. The new ones are the most likely to still be relevant, so don't let them expire while you're working through messages that are a month old already.
- If a message is over two weeks old and requires more than two minutes of work, ask if the person still needs whatever they asked for.
- Don't feel bad about replying and saying you don't have time to do something.
- If something really needs to get done, but you know you can't get to it today, Defer it for a bounded random time, so that it will come back to your attention at some point in the next week, or the next month.
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Final Thoughts
| Here is how to get back on Revive Your Inbox bandwagon | Tweet |
| Life gets messy, and so does your inbox. Learn how to recover here. | Tweet |
| Going on vacation? Here's how to prepare so you don't have Inbox 1000 when you return. | Tweet |
| Overloaded inbox? Resist the urge to clean it out in one fell swoop. Divide and conquer. | Tweet |
Congratulations, you've now completed the Revive Your Inbox program! So, is this goodbye? Not quite! You'll hear from us one last time tomorrow, with your certificate for completing the program and links to all 21 days of the material so you can go back when you want to.