EPISODE 1 - Organisation: How to handle the daily flood of emails?

Michael Seidl: how to handle the daily flood of emails.

Michael Seidl: a new episode of Get Shit Done in IT podcast. And today we talk about a very special topic and I think everyone can relate on is how to handle the daily flood of emails. So everyone is getting emails after emails, hourly, per minute, whatever. And I want to share my experience on how I found a way to... deal with the massive emails to make sure that all the emails will not stop you from concentrate work and concentrate flow. So it's nothing I invented. It's just some ways others figured out and I got mine and built my tool set of how to handle all the daily deflude of emails. And one keyword or keywords are zero inbox. That means, of course, it's not possible to have no emails. But behind zero inbox is that there is no read email in your inbox. That means if you read an email, then you will take immediate action of the next steps. So. Make yourself imagine, I think most of you will have the same situation. You are at the grocery, check your emails. You wait for your kids to get off the school or kindergarten, check your emails. You're doing a car ride and maybe in the traffic jam, check your emails. But what are you really doing with that emails? You just read it and forget it or read it and say, I'll do it later. But... How useful is that? So take a different approach. If you read your emails, make sure you have plenty of time, you are in the correct environment, so on your working desk or on your iPad, iPhone, tablet, whatever, and also can do or plan your actions accordingly to the email. And most of the time, this is not...

Michael Seidl: do -able when you're at the grocery or in the car driving yourself. So plan some time of the day where you really check and process your emails. This means, for example, I do it around three times a day, so in the morning, midday, and in the evening before I stop my business day. And for this, I take... depends 5, 10, 15 minutes each to really process my email, to read my email and to act. And for this there are three rules. So read your emails and now decide what's next. Is it something you should do it? And it takes just a few minutes then do it. So this depends on you. So if you have one, two, three minutes per email and you can immediately solve and forget the email. Do it and remove it from your inbox. Is it something it takes longer? So you need to check something, you need to plan a meeting or an appointment, whatever. Then plan it in your global to -do task list or create an entry there and remove that email from your inbox. Or it is something someone else has to do. Then send that email to that person. Call that person, whatever, go to his desk, tell them that thing he has to do and remove it from your list. And of course, before removing it from the inbox, maybe make an entry that this person is taking care of that topic, whatever, and then remove the email from your inbox. And that's it. It's simple, but it's very useful and... very helpful to prevent you from being distracted by all your emails. And important is that you really take all the actions and remove that email from your inbox. Don't store any information in your inbox for later. Don't store any to -dos in your inbox for later. Inbox or mail is not a to -do list. Yes, Outlook has that feature with the red flag and whatever.

Michael Seidl: It is not a to -do list. This will be a different topic on a different episode to have a single source of all things to do. But Outlook or email is definitely not that part. So process your emails, read it, understand what to do, and remove it from the inbox. And if you plan this, there is no more need to check every few minutes your emails. And also when you see it, the the communication of emails. We in our company and what I also see from other customers and other companies, email is not a way of urgent information. So I do not expect someone answering my email between the first 24 hours. If I need a feedback earlier or shorter than 24 hours, There are different ways. I can chat via Teams, Slack, Cisco, whatever messaging tool you use, WhatsApp, short message, whatever. I can message him. Or if it is really, really urgent, I do it old school, I can call it by my phone. So I will take my phone, call the number and say, hey, we have this and this problem, I need your help. Or of course, Before all this home office and remote work stand up for your desk go to the next room and go to the desk of that person and ask him to help or to do anything, but please keep in mind that Is it really necessary to Disturb or distract that person from their actual work? So is it really urgent that you have to send him a message? Is it really urgent that you need to call him or go to his desk? Or maybe or might be or is it okay that you send him an email and he's answering when he's ready and have time to process your emails? Just take it as you would like to have it. So you really want to have...

Michael Seidl: every five minutes someone stands in your office or call you on your phone just to tell you any information. It would be best that this guy is sending you an email and you can read through that information when you have time and you're not in the concentration in a project and you want to concentrate for a time. It is then not that someone disturbs you from just an information. So this could be an email. So this keep in mind. So as I said, I myself cannot cannot I'm not not 100 % perfect in that rules by myself. I know that it's working. I know that it is helping me to be more productive. And I know when I'm not follow those rules how to find back on track very fast. So give yourself a try, try the rules and you will see that it's really increasing your productivity. So in summary, keep in mind zero inbox, make yourself time slots a day, one, two or three. There are also no customers. They only check the emails once a day. So that's also fine. So make yourself comfortable what's fine for you. So zero inbox, set yourself some appointments as you need it to go through emails, process each email, do it immediately, plan it or delegate it, and remove it from the inbox. And you will see your productivity will increase a lot. So I hope this helps you to be more productive. If you have any questions or anything you want to this podcast talk about, everything related to IT of course, then connect with me on LinkedIn, send me a message, send me a text message or send me a voice message, whatever you like. But the best way to get in contact with me will be LinkedIn. The link is or the address is in the show notes or in the podcast description. So feel free to contact me.

Michael Seidl: Send me your questions and hopefully your questions will be in the next podcast. So thank you very much and bye bye.