turns out there's a secret to managing your email a secret that's simple but profound because it changes everything the way you think about process organize and the way you prioritize email so here's the secret most people look at their inbox and they see messages they see a list of messages but when i open my inbox i see something different i see a set of actions actions that are telling me to do things like reply review do and meet and that's the secret emails aren't messages their actions i know it seems simple but sometimes it's the most obvious things that are overlooked when this concept of emails being actions rather than messages first hit me i knew it was important but i didn't know how important the more time i spent playing around with it the more i realized that this changed everything most importantly it solved the biggest problems that i encountered when trying to master my email the first major problem this concept solves is how to prioritize email [Music] before i show you how that works the first key thing i want you to know if you don't already is that with most email software it isn't easy to prioritize using the inbox most inboxes by default prioritize by date from newest to oldest so if you have a bunch of priority emails they'll show up in random places in your inbox with just a little flag or a color change if you set them the problem is that they're hard to see and not very organized your eyes have to jump all over the place just to figure them out and if you decide to sort your inbox by whatever priority scheme you use it creates a whole new problem when new messages come in they'll appear below the priority list like the messages marked new on this page now this might not seem like a big deal but what usually happens is that people end up with so many priority emails that it's hard to see new messages and before long they end up going back to sorting emails by date which again makes the priority emails hard to see inboxes just aren't good at prioritizing email which is why we need folders to prioritize our email now in this case we're prioritizing using two folders one called important and the other called everything else now just to be clear this isn't our technique i'm just using this as an example in the next chapter i'll show you how this works with action folders which is the technique i recommend but first let's look at some examples of how people use folders to prioritize here are five different ways to prioritize using folders the first one is the one that we use here at double gemini and the remaining four are the most common ones i've seen people use aside from just leaving everything in their inbox and prioritizing by date i'm going to start with the common prioritization schemes beginning with person and then i'm going to come back to how i do things i see a lot of people prioritize by person which means to put emails into folders based on the people or groups you need to respond to and then choose which people are the most important to respond to and work down from there i've seen people prioritize by project so they set up folders for each of their projects and drop emails into them and answer them based on the priority of the project i've also seen people organize email by urgency for example urgent high medium low and another technique i've seen people use is the getting things done or gtd technique which is a process developed by david allen and finally i've taught people to organize emails by action now of course this is the prioritization approach that i recommend for a number of reasons the first is because it's easier to prioritize emails by action than any other method let's first look at what most people do to prioritize so imagine that you had a few emails that involve scheduling meetings it's easy to say which meeting should happen first second and third based on your calendar availability it's a lot harder when you start putting other actions into the mix try prioritizing a meeting against an email that needs you to do a task against another separate email that you need to reply to it's hard because we're no longer comparing the same things emails that contain meetings emails that contain tasks and emails that you just need to reply to are not apples to apples it's like trying to prioritize between a set of socks and a set of mugs i can tell you which socks i like compared to other socks and pick my favorite between the different mugs i have in the house i can even tell you that i care about socks more than i care about mugs but throw them all in the same pile and asked me to prioritize between them and i could do it but it would really slow me down because my criteria for why i would choose a particular sock or mug over the other becomes more complicated it takes too much brain power to figure it out all of the other approaches for prioritizing email are painful for the same reason because they view emails as messages instead of actions that's what makes them so tedious and that's where the stack method comes in the stack method allows you to make your prioritization trade-offs at a higher more rational level at the level of the actions themselves but that's not the only reason that the stack method is better another big advantage is that stack requires less effort than these other approaches [Music] with the stack method you'll have a finite set of action folders if you prioritize by person or project your list of folders will be long continuously growing and will require a lot of effort to keep organized and keep prioritized the stack method takes less effort than managing by urgency as well now i know a lot of people like to prioritize by urgency but urgency has a critical flaw which is that the level of urgency for an email often changes daily today a specific email might be high in priority for example imagine that an email is asking you to create a report but tomorrow a new higher priority request might come in making your previous email to create a report far less urgent which means if you didn't get to it today you have to shuffle it into a new folder tomorrow now this kind of shuffling takes place on a daily basis when you organize by urgency because your urgency changes all of the time i can tell you from experience that after a few days of doing this that it was way too much work so things just ended up staying in the first folder i placed them in until i got to them which defeated the purpose of organizing by urgency in the first place in contrast if i organize by action i've prioritized my action folders once and i never need to shuffle an email again so in this case i'm using five action folders reply for replies do for tasks meet for meetings forward for emails i need to delegate and review for emails that contain newsletters or other things that are less important but i should scan and in this case i've prioritized these in the order you're seeing if an email goes into my do folder and i decide not to act on it today i never have to move it again tomorrow i can just evaluate if it's more or less important than my other dues and take it from there but i don't have to evaluate it against my replies which i've already decided are more important this saves me effort brain power time and eliminates frustration all at the same time and gtd isn't as elegant for a number of different reasons the two-minute rule fragmented my time some folders like the next action folder got overloaded with emails and it has the same prioritization issues as the other folders using gtd to manage my email required way too much effort gave me anxiety and killed my productivity aside from making it easier to prioritize and requiring less effort to manage my email the stack method has another huge advantage over these techniques it's faster and not by a little by a long shot the first reason the stack method is faster is because you can batch process a set of similar actions really fast let's come back to socks and mugs but take it up a level to laundry and dishes picture folding one piece of clothing then washing one dish and going back and folding another piece of clothing washing another dish and doing this until both your dishes and your laundry are done it would take forever the reason rational people fold clothes and do dishes and batches is because it's faster in the same way it's faster to stick to just your replies then your meetings then your dues and so on when you're in reply mode you can blow through all of your replies when you're in schedule mode for meetings you check your calendar get a feeling for your open time then you can quickly handle all of your schedules at once with all of the other techniques you'd be opening and closing your calendar multiple times just to get them all done and the same applies to all of the rest of the folders the question i get most often about the stack method is isn't it slower to sort your emails into action folders first i thought it was going to be slower too when i first started doing this but it turns out that i can scan and move an email into a folder in about 3 seconds so i can sort about 20 emails a minute and essentially clear 100 emails out of my inbox in about five minutes and i do this using shortcut keys which makes it a lot faster now i'm going to show you how to set up and use shortcut keys in the how to video series that supports this i've even come back from vacation and cleared about 700 emails in roughly 30 minutes so the cool part is that with the stack method you can even recover from vacations or extended absences really quickly which is a game changer yes it takes a few minutes to sort before you start responding but if this was a race if you sort first you would not only win you would win by a landslide it's like choosing to take a few minutes to put on a jet pack before a marathon you'll be on to other things while everyone else is still plodding along but there's another more interesting reason for why the stack is faster and that's because we can't answer all of our emails every single day now hold on to that thought because i'm going to explain why this makes stacking faster now this was tricky to figure out and it's a little tricky to explain so listen close picture this every time you open an email you've got to go through four steps to understand it and act on it you have to open it scan it decide what to do and then act on it if you choose not to act on it or just can't act on it at that moment which will be the case for a large number of emails if not the overwhelming majority of your emails then you're back to opening it again to figure out what to do with it now that won't make a difference if you've just got one or a handful of emails but if you're talking about 30 or 50 or 100 emails then it suddenly becomes a drain i've seen the same person open up the same inconsequential email over 36 times with our mail tracking software at a minimum that's over half a minute of time they wasted on just one email instead imagine after they opened it and scanned it and decided what to do they put it into an action folder at this point they never have to go through the first three steps again anytime they work through their action folders they can just jump right into acting on it and when you think about this with the hundreds of emails you get each week and the thousands if not tens of thousands you get each year it's collectively a huge time savings imagine if you had to pay taxes every time you open an email and had to figure out what to do with it by sorting first you're paying the tax once why would you want to pay the same tax two or three or four times so with the stack method you save time by batch processing your emails and you save time by sorting them first but even better is that you've simplified and sped up your decision making this is mind space that you can use more effectively to deliver that next big project or use to be more creative for all of the things that you're working on today manage your emails by action and your life will be better you'll be able to prioritize easily work through your email faster and spend less brain power doing it next i'll show you simple but powerful rules for creating action folders that'll keep your email organized and be optimized to work for you [Music] you
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