At one time, email was so novel and game-changing that Warner Brothers made a film about how exciting it could be to get mail.

I go online, and my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words: you’ve got mail. Meg Ryan, You’ve Got Mail

These days, the average staff officer would rather watch a film called ‘You Don’t Have Mail’. When you return from leave your breath catches when you see just how much mail you’ve got.

 We’ve become used to instant messaging these days, but it wasn’t always that way. In fact, before email, soldiers and officers were more easily able to control their information, which in turn meant it was easier to concentrate on prioritization and easier to focus on a single task.

 From the perspective of efficiency, it allowed them to deliver better outcomes. From a human perspective, it gave them more control, because these days dealing with your inbox is about dealing with information overload.

Meanwhile, on flows the e-mail down the screen, like a current with riptides and swirls…You paddle frantically and seem to get nowhere. Checking e-mail on vacation, at night, in the car, at the bus stop, or in the grocery store … is like trying to stick a finger in a dam. The flow just finds a new crack, a new fissure, and before long it’s pouring out again. John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

How can you get back some semblance of that control today, without losing the clear advantages email gives a leader? One of the best ways is to reframe the problem. Imagine yourself in the days before email. Imagine that now, instead of via your PC, you get your emails by post, dropping through your letterbox or being dropped into your in-tray. When you think of an email as an electronic version of a letter it helps provide you create some perspective on how to control your inbox.

 The advantage of email – instantaneous, simple communication – is also its danger. Email has lowered the bar to communicate to the point where it is too easy to communicate. Once upon a time, before writing a letter you need to have something to say. Now you email the guy next to you to ask him if he wants to go to lunch.

 50 years ago you wouldn’t carbon copy a letter to everyone just in case they needed to know about it. You wouldn’t sit next to your post box, with postmen arriving every minute to deliver new letters onto your lap. You wouldn’t feel the need to answer every letter or memo as soon as it arrived.

 Based on that principle, here are nine pieces of advice to help you become the master of your inbox, not its slave.

Control What Comes In

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. Herb Simon, Economist and Political Scientist

1. Turn off the automatic notification

All those dings and pop up notifications are distractions. If it was a contact report, perhaps you’d need to know about it straight away. But it’s not. It’s an email. You control it, not the other way around.

 For some reason, Microsoft defaults to thinking you need those distractions. Believe me, you don’t.

 2. Set the inbox to only go to the server periodically (you can always hit ‘send/receive’)

Similarly, you don’t need a constant stream of emails any more than you need a constant stream of letters arriving in your post box. The postman comes once a day because even urgent letters are actually not that urgent. The sky won’t fall down if you set your inbox to refresh every 2 hours.

 You can set Outlook to only send/receive at certain intervals under the send/receive settings. Setting it to check the server every 2 hours or so will stop the information flow from being a constant drip to being a regular postal delivery.

 If you somehow find that you are so damn efficient that you’ve run out of things to do, then hit the send/receive button. Similarly, if you are expecting an important email then change the settings back to a constant send/receive. Or just hit the send/receive button.

Control It Once It’s In

 The worst thing you can do is use your inbox as a to-do list. It isn’t – your inbox is like the mat inside your front door or your postbox outside your house. It simply holds the letters, ignorant to their priority or importance.

 1. Have a ‘to do’ list – but don’t use Outlook

Once upon a time, I used Outlook as a ‘to do’ list. Every email was prioritised red/amber/green. Then purple for tasks I’d responded to and was awaiting a response. It mostly worked, but what happened when the CO came into the office and gave me a task verbally? Did I ask him to email me? Obviously not. Did I email myself?

 I realize now that every task needs to be in one place, otherwise its hard to build a genuine priority list. Email is a delivery tool, not a ‘to do’ list. Would you let your postman write your ‘to do’ list? Let’s hope not.

 Instead, I’m a big fan of having a bullet journal or notebook. The notebook becomes my daily ‘to do’ list. Each morning – before I turn on my email – I bring every task forward from the day before and then consider what I have to do that day. Its a routine I owe to JP Morgan. Then, and only then, do I open the inbox.

 Think of it as being like deciding what’s important to do each day before you go outside to check your post box. You own what’s important, not the inbox.

2. Ruthlessly prioritise

Go through your inbox, top to bottom. If you can answer the email in under 3 minutes, then do so. If not, prioritise it. Add it to your to-do list with a high/medium/low priority. Then move on.

 I’ve found it useful to change my Outlook settings so that I have to manually set the email to ‘read’. This means that if I scan an email and identify it as one I’ll have to come back to, it stays tagged as ‘unread’. It helps to differentiate between emails that have been read and actioned and those that have been scanned and prioritised for later action.

3. Put aside time to check your inbox each day to do this

I accept this won’t work for everyone, but if emails are trying to control you, you need to find time to win the battle. I put aside a slot of time each morning exclusively for email, and then another in the afternoon.

 Although not everyone has easily controllable work routines, putting time aside means, again, that you control your inbox, not the other way around.

 Once you’ve done all this, you don’t need your email for a while. So,

 Turn off Outlook if you have a task to do

Once upon a time, ‘multitasking’ was god. It was a false god. The truth is, if you’ve got yourself to the place where you have complex tasks to do then you need to concentrate on them. A staff officer who works tirelessly but can’t deliver quality analysis isn’t providing value to their boss or their team.

At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that [multi tasking] requires – the constant switchings and pivotings – energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination, and simultaneously appear to short-change some of the higher areas related to memory and learning.

We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on. Walter Kirn, The Autumn of the Multitaskers

Hopefully, you’ve already turned off the constant update of your email and turned off the notifications. But it’s still too easy to get distracted because sometimes you secretly want to get distracted. Checking your inbox can be an effective procrastination tool. So close Outlook and allow yourself to really focus.

Control What Goes Out

If you’ve managed to get some control over your inbox, don’t be that guy who causes others’ inboxes to overflow. If we all get into the habit of being considerate email users we can make everyone’s life easier.

1. Understand the difference between To: and Cc:

The To: and Cc: address boxes go back to the days when you’d write a letter to someone for action and then send carbon copies to others so they knew what was going on. Today it’s no different. If you send me an email and I’m in the Cc: box I’ll read it then delete it. If I’m in the To: box I’ll look for the action on me. If you’ve got it wrong, I’ll waste time working out what on earth you wanted me to do. I resent it. So be the guy who gets it right.

2. Do you really need to Cc: your boss?

When you Cc your boss, you undermine your autonomy. Its a bit of an aside, but you want your boss to be used to you making decisions without you letting him know what you’ve done.

If you’re the boss, do you really need your subordinates Cc’ing you into everything? Set up some rules: ‘Only Cc me in if it’s going to a higher headquarters or if it’s essential that I know.’

3. Call first

Sometimes you need to email a load of people with the same information. Sometimes you can’t get hold of the person. But sometimes, you’re just being lazy. As a rule of thumb, if you need an answer in less than 24 hours, make a call.

 If you are sending a one-to-one email, try calling first. It can actually be faster to call someone, explain the context of the question or issue, then agree to send an email. Not only is it faster, but the person at the other end will thank you. They might be able to answer the question verbally. Even if not, you’ll have put your email at the front of their mind when it comes in.

Be The Master, Not The Slave

Email may have revolutionised our lives, but it’s just a communication tool. That means, just like other tools,  you need to use it effectively, safely and without injuring others. Control what comes in, control email it once its in, and then control what you send out to others.

In this era of constant electronic contact, you need to make sure you are the master of your email, not the other way around.

The editor of thearmyleader.co.uk is a former infantry officer in the British Army. The thoughts in his articles draw on his experiences and thoughts from two decades in the Army and several years in training and leadership development roles. He has deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan on four tours, and on several overseas training missions. His views are his own and do not represent the views of the UK MOD or the British Army.

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