(Email) Zero to Hero

I read a great post by Laurie Anstis on his Work/Life/Law blog earlier this week about email management.

This kind of thing is LawHacking in action... smarter workflows to make life easier and more efficient.

Like Laurie I am a fan of the Inbox Zero concept. The preceding link is to the original articles written by Merlin Mann in 2006, but he also has a book in the works.

The basic concept is simple:- avoid using your email Inbox as a repository / filing tray / todo list. I'm sure we all know lawyers who have thousands of emails sitting in their Inbox in various states of urgency, relevance and importance. I have adopted Inbox zero for the last two years or so, and by the end of (most) days I have no emails left in my Inbox when I leave the office... there are times when a deal is in full flow I don't manage it, but it is always a temporary blip.

This isn't to say I don't get many emails (far from it) or that I complete everything which arrives during the day (generally I haven't). What I have done is reviewed each email once and done one of five things:-

1. Done it (if it requires an action which will take less than 2 minutes or so
2. Delegated it (if it is something which doesn't require any action from me)
3. Diarised it (not strictly accurate as you will see below, but close enough)
4. Dumped it (spam, junk mail, things I am CCd on which aren't relevant to me)
5. Filed it (stuff which requires no action, but needs to be filed on a client matter or kept for future reference)

Once that is done it either gets dragged into case management (if it relates to a matter) or moved to an Outlook folder relating to the project in question (again, more about projects below).

Going through this exercise is critical in order to get to real Inbox Zero. Outlook rules are useful to dump stuff which is clearly rubbish or prioritise emails for review (which seems to be system Laurie uses), but unless the rule itself carries out one these five actions the emails are still part of your "inbox" in the larger sense. You haven't dealt with them, just moved them around.

Rules can work - faxes are a good example. Faxes to our department come in by email. I don't really do faxes so they are almost never for me. An Outlook rule moves them into a folder for my secretary to check and (once or twice a year!) she sends on one which is actually relevant to me.

Where Inbox Zero becomes interesting is when you actually start using it. It isn't just about email management. What those unprocessed emails really are is a nagging distraction from what you should actually be focussing on at a given moment... by either actioning them or putting them into a trusted system where you subconsciously know that you will be prompted to deal with them at the appropriate time you remove this clutter from your mental radar.

I imagine this all sounds a bit new-agey, but it can work. I use the word "can" advisedly, because it very much depends on the trusted system which you use for the Delegating and Diarising.

I find that it works most effectively as part of an implementation of David Allen's Getting Things Done®. In fact the whole concept of processing your inbox (which in this case might be emails, correspondence or any other kind of input) and breaking it down into actionable items in a trusted system is key to the whole GTD® concept.

I don't want to go into this in detail (visit David's website and buy the book - you will be pleased you did). The main point here is that the actions which you "diarise" from your inbox review should be identifiable, actionable tasks (rather than "Sell my house" they should be things like "Telephone Estate Agent and make appointment for valuation"). The trusted system you use to record them should mean you don't have to think about them as you will be reminded to do them at the appropriate time (and place... another key concept is to only present you with actions you can actually accomplish based on where you are and the resources you have to hand).

Trusted System is a fairly cheesy term, but it basically covers whatever system you use to record these actions, whether it is a pen and index cards, Outlooks tasks or whatever. Recently I have been using Omnifocus which captures and manages actions across all the various devices I use, but more about this in a later post.

This isn't some kind of magic bullet to revolutionise your legal practice, but it is surprising how much less stressful if makes dealing with your email on a day to day basis. If you are finding your inbox piling up I would recommend reading the Inbox Zero articles and giving it a shot.