The article is full of sad cases of people who think that declaring email bankruptcy will solve their problem. It won’t. I’ve talked about why email bankruptcy is worse in some ways than financial bankruptcy, and this shows why email bankruptcy is not a solution.

Just as people without financial skills may find themselves bankrupt, people who lack email and time-management skills will find themselves wanting to declare email bankruptcy. People are usually restricted from starting businesses immediately after a financial bankruptcy. In a similar manner, people who suffer from extreme email overload should ensure they get some training in how to handle their workload before they get back in the game.

It’s not just a skill these people are lacking, though. It’s a way of viewing their inboxes and the place the inbox occupies in their life. I’m always saying that email overload is a state-of-mind, and David Ferris puts this very nicely:

“A lot of people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of the day. They can’t have it anymore.”

I speak from experience. I once declared “job bankruptcy” — my inability to cope with my workload, in which email played a major part, prompted me to tender my resignation. My boss did not want to accept it, but I was determined. During the time that I worked out my notice, I adopted the Getting Things Done method. All of a sudden, I had more than doubled my productivity and reduced my stress tremendously. GTD worked for me because it solved both the practical and psychological sides of the problem. I found that I could do the job well after all, and I continued working there for another 18 months!

A 2005 study by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London shows that people who allow themselves to be constantly interrupted by email and instant messaging perform slightly worse than those who are stoned on pot.

Researchers asked two sets of subjects to take IQ tests. One group had to check e-mail and respond to instant messages while taking the test. The second group just sat down and did the test without distractions. Surprise, surprise, the distracted group didn’t do as well on the test—10 points worse than the control group. In similar testing conditions, people intoxicated by marijuana had scores 8 points lower.

Discover Magazine [via Tom Mighell]

The above study tested the effects on IQ, but I’m quite sure that both activities impair judgment just as badly. How strange it is that multi-tasking is considered “good” in today’s work environment!

Apart from its effects on our IQ and judgment, multi-tasking can also waste an incredible amount of time. Every time we switch from one task to another, it can take us fifteen minutes to get up to speed on the new task. Each time we interrupt ourselves to check email, we are costing ourselves a fifteen minute delay, even if we only spend two minutes away from the original task.

How to avoid this trap:

• Turn off your email notification chime!
• Define specific times of day during which you check email, and don’t check email at any other time.
• Don’t use your inbox as a task list — this will only suck you into email every time you want to get some “proper” work done. Instead, once you have determined that a message requires work, drag it into a special folder entitled “Action”, or drag it into Outlook’s task list. You can even write it down on a piece of paper. Whichever method you choose, the main thing is to get it out of the inbox.

If you succeed in resisting the urge for constant stimulation, you will be rewarded by being able to complete solid chunks of high quality work, and you will probably benefit from a significantly lower stress level, too.

As I used to be one of these overloaded individuals, I can tell you that they only reply to two types of people: those whose cooperation they need in order to get their own job done, and those who badger them persistently enough to make them feel uncomfortable or embarrassingly inefficient.

As I said, I used to be one of these people. I now consistently reply to almost all of my email within 24 hours. So how do I maintain my responsiveness?

In my old way of doing things, if I needed to reply to a message, it was extremely tempting to leave it in the inbox as a reminder to reply. Creating an entry on my task list saying “Reply to such-and-such message” seemed a bit ridiculous to me, so I used to let these messages loiter around in my inbox until I got around to answering them. (Or until they got tired of waiting and disappeared.)

You can guess that my inbox was clogged up with messages that I’d already read. I found that it was easy for such messages to get buried and forgotten, and at best they wasted my time when I re-read and re-re-read them as I scanned my inbox.

I am now disciplined enough to keep my inbox free of clutter, so what do I do with the messages that I need to reply to?

This 2-step solution guarantees that I don’t forget to reply:

1. Need to reply but don’t have time right now? Drag the message into a special folder, entitled “Reply”, that holds all the messages that need replying to.
2. Schedule a couple of times a day, every day, in which to crank though the Reply folder, during which you shoot off the necessary answers and file the messages elsewhere.
   If you don’t have time to formulate a reply to a complex or time-consuming issue, use this method to keep the other side’s faith until you get the chance to reply.

Since I started using this strategy, replying within 24 hours is no longer stressful – it’s just part of my regular routine.

Related Article: How to keep track of overdue replies that other people owe you

This is how we would typically handle (or mishandle) a crisis:

• Management panics and declares an emergency: all hands on deck.

• A crisis team is convened and charged with forming an action plan, for everyone else to carry out.

• An action plan is produced, requiring multiple departments to contribute time and resources to carry out their slice of the action plan.

• Everyone drops everything and gets busy carrying out their parts of the action plan, reconvening at regular intervals to keep the adrenaline pumping, and to show that work is being done.

• A solution is delivered. Response: "Almost there but not quite…" – another push needed. After a few more volleys, the crisis has been successfully averted.

With hindsight, many of these crises could have been handled with much less ado, if only management had kept their cool and not hit the panic button.

Although "necessity is the mother of invention", with all that adrenaline pumping, the "fight or flight" reflex kicks in, and people are encouraged to attack the problem. Note the emphasis above on action – management want to see that something is being done. Now. In all of these situations we came up with workable solutions, but in many cases cheaper, less disruptive and better quality solutions came to light soon afterwards.

What have I learned from all this:

• An action plan is a good political device to show that something is being done, while covering up the fact that a good solution has not yet been found. The authors of the plan may not even be conscious of this – they may be convinced that it leads to a solution, but they are often mistaken, because it is a solution for the wrong problem.

• Don't attempt to force a solution to a problem. Attacking complex problems under stress is very expensive and produces mediocre solutions at best.

• If you can keep your cool and resist the urge to act until you have reached a fundamental understanding of the problem and a clear vision of what the solution looks like, you will invariably find that the problem is rather different from what you originally thought and considerably easier to solve.

In a recent interview for Fortune Magazine, Carlos Ghosn, CEO of both Renault (France) and Nissan (Japan) said,

"Stress builds up when you know that there is a problem but you do not clearly see it, and you do not have a solution."

I have found that the following steps help me reach this fundamental understanding and clarity of vision:

• Never accept a problem at face value.

• Always go directly to the person who raised the issue (the "stakeholder") and get confirmation that your understanding of it is accurate. See the situation from this person's viewpoint and keep trying to describe what you see in different ways until they agree that you have phrased it accurately.

• Once you've understood the current situation, you must ensure that you fully understand why it is a problem. "This situation is problematic because …"

• Then, imagine that you are a magician. Wave your magic wand and make the problem disappear. What does the situation look like now? Keep waving your magic wand until the stakeholder embraces the scenario you describe.

• You have now described both the problem and the acceptable solution. You know where you stand, and where you need to end up. Now you are ready to think calmly about how to connect the dots and map out your route to a solution.

Do you check your work email

• when you get home from work in the evening?
• and again at night before you go to bed?
• and again before leaving for work in the morning?
• on weekends?
• when you are on vacation?
• on your Blackberry during dinner? / in the bathroom? / while travelling to work?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above, you must be working in a profession where each email is a life or death matter or you must be so important that your company would collapse in your absence (in which case it’s not a very viable company).

If you answered “no” to all of the above: if your inbox is overflowing with fresh messages by the time you make it into work early in the morning, it’s because there are others in your company who can answer “yes” to some of the above questions. These are the people who ruin it for everyone else.

I’m ashamed to say that in a previous life, I could answer “yes” to all of the above (apart from the BlackBerry ones). I treated each email as a potential matter of life and death, if not for the company then for the rat-race I was participating in.

I realized that this was very unhealthy behavior, but one event in particular sticks in my mind as the turning point. It was the night before I was due to take a rare three-day break with my family at a resort on the Dead Sea. Attempting to clear my desk before leaving, I pulled an all-nighter to plow through my overflowing inbox, so that my team and colleagues would be able to survive my 3-day absence without having to disturb me (which unfortunately was not taboo in the company’s culture). At this point I remember reflecting wistfully on whether I worked for my team and associated matrix or whether they worked for me. The upside of this all-night email session was that I could fire off tens of emails and disappear without having to deal with the replies and resulting email threads as the recipients debated the issues. Or so I thought. At 4 a.m. I noticed that replies had started arriving! I was not the only one processing my email well into the small hours.

If you are in a similar situation, try looking at it from the following perspectives:

• Your employer uses modern technology to encourage you to stay umbilically connected to work when you’re at home. Does you employer encourage you to bring your family to work with you? Or to chat with them all day via IM?
• “No one ever gets to their death bed and wishes that they’d spent more time at work” — Darren Rowse.
• If you washed your hands as often as you check email, would people peg you as obsessive-compulsive?

Have you ever asked yourself why you work? If you didn’t need the money would you still be at your current job? Many of you will say “yes”. This is because for many of us, our jobs are challenging enough to give us a sense of achievement and accomplishment, which is just as important as food on the table and a roof over our heads. You must be a real super-achiever if constantly having to check your email does not detract from your feeling of achievement.

I don’t believe anyone who says he can sustain a high quality of work with optimal creativity and insight while being totally immersed in work during almost every waking moment. If you occasionally allow yourself to stop hacking your way through the jungle and rise above the treetops, you will gain a clarity of vision that will enhance your value to your employer, and will also help you to reach an ideal balance between your work and your family.

Let’s end off with something practical. M3 Sweatt writes about one brave manager at Microsoft:

One manager here is so serious about work/life balance that he all but forbids his team from sending emails late into the night (sure, there are exceptions to the rule). But he is able to live within the boundaries by responding to mail ofline after the family goes to bed and then sync’ing mail the next morning at the office.

Why don’t you pluck up the courage to behave like this, and encourage your colleagues to follow suit? (Hey, I just realized the true meaning of en-courage!)

A number of SpeedFiler users have quite emotionally told me about the part SpeedFiler has played in helping them get out of this situation. For example:

I just wanted to share with you the fact that I used SpeedFiler over the past three days to shrink my inbox size from 1200 messages to 50. The first 400-500 messages went relatively easily, but the remaining got harder and harder as the number shrank (each successive filtering gets harder). SpeedFiler was absolutely critical in easing the burden. I couldn’t have done it using Outlook’s basic “Move to Folder” interface.

The psychological benefit of shrinking an inbox cannot be underestimated. I now know all issues I need to respond to, including issues from several weeks ago. The noise is gone — I can see the trees.

I now have to unlearn/relearn new skills — handle the messages as they arrive, don’t leave them in the inbox (if possible) to say “I’ll handle it some other time”.

SpeedFiler is not just about filing messages, it is just as much about making it easy to get them out of the way, so that your vision is not clouded by unprocessed “stuff”. It gives you a gentle push by encouraging and prompting you to file your messages, but you still have to deal with the “hard” part: deciding how to handle each message.

While using SpeedFiler on his email mountain, this person also figured out one of the basic principles of GTD: process a message when you first read it. By the time you close the message, you should have decided how it affects you:

• Is it actionable? If so, what’s the next action? (–> do it now OR add to task list/calendar OR delegate it to someone else)
• Do I need to keep this? If so, where does it belong?

These are seemingly easy decisions, but they force us to recognize reality, which is difficult for some of us to face, so we are tempted to let the message remain in the inbox.

If you get into the habit of processing your email in this way, your inbox will cease to be a Pandora’s Box, however full it might get while you’re concentrating on other things. You will now be in complete control: your inbox will be working for you, and not vice versa.

However, a few of the people I contacted gave me an almost identical response: “It sounds really interesting, but I’m too busy right now. I’ll try it out in a few weeks.” Because I know them well, I know they are not just being polite, and having worked closely with them in the past, I also know that SpeedFiler could save them lots of time and reduce their stress.

I remember a time when I would have given the same answer — that was before I clawed my way back from the edge, with the aid of GTD. The above answer boils down to:

“I don’t have time to save time!”

Some people are so stressed by their workload to the point where they simply don’t feel they can invest (risk?) a few minutes in something that will (might?) save much more than that on the very first day. These people are so far gone, that they almost cannot be helped. (I know because I’ve been there!)

These are also the people with the most to gain from my product, and I’m wracking my brains to find a way to get the message across.