Inbox Zero – Manage the email madness.

According to a quick Google search there 293.6 billion emails are sent per day in 2019. Just take that in for one second. 7.7 Billion people on Earth, approximately half of whom utilise emails. That’s around 80 emails recieved per person per day!

Managing emails as a teacher can be incredibly challenging, particularly in a larger setting. In this blog I will outline how I have achieved a healthy relationship with my inbox thanks to the advice of others and how I hope it will positively impact on my colleagues. (WARNING – NO ORIGINAL IDEAS CONTAINED WITHIN!)

This is my inbox. I like it! This is how I keep it.

So how is this achieved? In short the following principles are followed:

• Your inbox is merely a landing pad for mail to be processed
• Emails should not be read as soon as they land, they should be processed and then dealt with at a more suitable time
• Folders should be kept to a minimum. A few large buckets is a more effective way of filing than 100’s of very specific small buckets! (more on this later)

The @ Folders

Once or twice a day I find 5 minutes to process my emails. During this time they are moved into one of three main folders. They are @ToAction @ToDo and @ToRead. The names aren’t super important but their roles are vital! The key to this system is to scan emails as they land and decide where to process them to. (Think Royal Mail sorting office.) In between these processing sessions I do attempt to process them as I go on Outlook on my mobile. Something else I now do is I avoid fully reading emails in the order they land! This is incredibly inefficient! If you do this you will likely end up wasting vital energy on mundane emails! Processing them to one of your three folders first will allow you to deal with them appropriately and effectively later.

• 

@ToAction Folder – As a rule of thumb if an email can be responded to or dealt with in 2 minutes or less, it gets processed into this folder. Emails here require little focused attention for the most part and can be addressed during those moments in the day when you are not at your most effective meaning you can be productive even when you are not on top form! (Thank you Graham Allcott! – author of “Productivity Ninja”.)

@ToDo Folder – Emails that need more than 2 minutes to respond to go here. These may require more time and thought and therefore will need more focused attention and should be address when your mind is at its most focused.

@ToRead Folder – Self-explanatory. I find this useful for newsletters, flyers and / or important documents sent down from the SLT that may require focused reading time. I only visit this folder when I know I have the time set aside to fully read some of the contents.

The Curse of Excessive Folders

Prior to Inbox Zero I had a huge number of folders. I was quite proud of my organisation of these folders. Alphabetised and with several tagged as favourites. The biggest issue I had was trying to find something later on! It was a nightmare! Truth be told folders beyond the three I mentioned above are mostly irrelevant given the sophisticated nature of the search function in most mail hosts.

Graham Allcott likens email folders to buckets. It is easier to throw something in a large bucket than a smaller one! This mean less, time wasted thinking and more time spent doing! So I ditched the vast majority of my folders and I haven’t looked back!

I say vast majority. I still keep a number of other useful folders including:

• Staff folders – here I can keep an easy access log of conversations and projects I have running with my colleagues. (Second in department, line manger, working party team etc.)
• Y11 Folder – a dumping ground for anything that may be pertinent to that end of year exams analysis!
• Reprographics – I keep a copy of ongoing jobs here so I don’t lose track! They are deleted when they are returned to me.
• Sol – ideas for Sol development that I can revisit in the summer term.
• Ideas – Yep. That’s it.

Email Conduct

Go back 12-18 months and I was firing emails off left, right and centre everyday. It was a consequence of the nature of my job. (Head of a Science faculty in a large secondary school.) Quite frankly I was getting on my own nerves let alone my teams. I tried newsletters for a time to reduce the need for as many emails but these were time-consuming to produce and therefore inefficient.

Others have blogged in more detail about email conduct and policies. @Alby is a great example here. Here are some ideas I have pinched that are currently working really well for me:

• Set up mail groups. (Super easy in Outlook!) I have email groups for Y7 Science Teachers, Y8, Y9 etc. I have one for the A-Level team and another for my Science leadership team. This means I can quickly send emails to teams of people rather than whole department or all staff emails.
• News Reel. (@Alby calls this a “living document” in his blog.) Any message that is not time sensitive gets posted on a word document and time stamped. My team are expected to check it once per day at their convenience. This helps me in two ways. Firstly it makes me consider the importance of the information I am trying to send out before doing so. Secondly it means that staff know that team emails I do still send are likely to be urgent or time sensitive. I also “grey” older items so staff can quickly identify new items. (See image below.)

Final thoughts on emails

• Some schools / departments enforce rules on when you can send emails. In my view that is a nonsense. Send the mail, its down to the recipient to determine when to open their inbox.
• Never apologise for sending an email! Chances are you are sending it because either need something done or require some information!
• Have several signatures saved for different audiences. I now sign off on internal ones with “Dave”. Simples.

I hope this has been of some use. Feel free to hit me up in the comments below or on Twitter here.

A final thank you to Graham Allcott and Alby for heavily influencing my improved email habits! It has been a life changer! 🙂

Thanks for stopping by!

Dave
@DJGTeaching