Email is where your decisions go to die

I’m exhausted already. (Smithsonian Institution)

I had to become an email expert — otherwise, I would have been buried alive by it.

Back when I was running a music school all by myself — something I don’t recommend — I received tons and tons of requests, complaints, ideas, and questions via email. Using David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, I was able to keep things manageable.

But every few days, there would come a moment in which I would find myself opening an email, reading it, and then closing it again. And the next one, and the next one. And then, the margin that I had so carefully created for myself — the buffer between me and chaos — would puncture as the number of “read and ignored” emails in my inbox metastasized over the next few hours or days, taking over the white space in my inbox and quickly growing out of control.

What happened? This still happens, in fact. It happens when I lose the valuable clarity that allows me to make decisions.

Ultimately, your email — and your voicemail, and your snail mail — is a repository of decisions to be made. Every person or entity contacting you is asking something of you, even if it’s simply a reply. And decisions, no matter how minor, require brainpower and clarity. After you make a series of decisions — which is what happens when you are processing your inbox — you might reach a point of decision fatigue in which you can’t readily come up with the available options. Therefore, you defer the message because you can’t do anything with it in the moment.

Deferring a decision isn’t such a problem on its own. When you recognize that you have reached the point of decision fatigue, you can take a break and then come back to the work when you have had some time to recharge. Unfortunately, the volume of incoming email may be so high that you are receiving more email each day than you have the capacity to process. When that happens, you won’t be able to deal with the deferred emails — you won’t even be able to make decisions on the ones that have arrived in the last hour.

What makes this problem even worse (as you well know — I don’t even need to tell you) is that seeing all those emails you’re behind on creates an emotional burden that further degrades your clarity and attention.

Plus, as emails age, they are increasingly difficult to respond to. Now you have to add stuff like, “I’m so sorry it’s taken me a few days to get back to you,” when you reply, or you have to painstakingly follow the thread of a conversation that you were copied on but not involved in to get up to speed and figure out what you’re supposed to do — or what you missed when you were overwhelmed.

You may have also noticed that you can reach this level of fatigue even without a significant volume of email. Sometimes, it’s the circumstances of your life — an illness, a day of travel, a death in the family — that makes you unable to deal with your email even when you pull up your inbox for the first time in a given day. It’s exhausting and demoralizing.

So what can we do about this? There are a few practices we can cultivate to reduce email fatigue and improve our work lives.

First of all, simply being aware of this dynamic is helpful. When you understand email as a repository of decisions awaiting your input, you will approach it differently. You will realize the perils of checking your email from your phone when your in line at the grocery store. You’ll recognize that the emails bearing information or diversion or friendly greetings are not the ones that are draining the precious life force from your body.

Then, recognizing that your email requires your full attention for this decision-making, you’ll start to see patterns. You might notice that you’re being asked to weigh in on decisions that aren’t important and could be delegated. You might notice that you’re receiving the same question repeatedly, and you could put something in place to answer that question more easily (whether adding it to a website FAQ or by composing a canned response). You might notice, as I did, that the decisions you tend to defer are the ones where you have to answer no and you don’t want to let the person down.

As these patterns reveal themselves, you might gain enough momentum to see where you’re spending a few seconds here or there to make unnecessary decisions that you take for granted. For example, you might have a system of folders or tags that you use to categorize email, or you might spend time thinking of which sign-off to use (“Sincerely? Fondly? Best wishes?”). When you view these tiny decisions in the context of all of the layers of decisions you have yet to make in a cluttered inbox, you will realize how costly they actually are. Like Steve Jobs with his uniform of black turtlenecks and dad jeans, you might choose to eliminate entire categories of minor decisions that will not affect the outcomes that matter to you.

I haven’t even touched the tendency that so many of us have to use our email inbox as a to-do list (don’t do it!) or creating systems to cut down on the volume of work-related email coming in. But when you see that email is where your deferred decisions are buried, not only will your email practices will improve, but also the newfound clarity might seep into the rest of your life. From there, you can make more important decisions about how much time you want to spend dealing with other people’s requests. You might release yourself from so much attention to email in order to put more energy into what you truly care about.

If you would like to learn systems and practices that will help you to spend less than 30 minutes a day on email, please reach out.

What’s your relationship to email? Do you find yourself easily overwhelmed by it? How have you coped? How do you decide what to let go? I’d love to hear in the comments.