Law Practice Matters

Ding.

That’s the unwelcome sound of yet another email arriving in your already overstuffed inbox.

Just a few years ago that sound filled us with wonder at the communication possibilities of the internet and now that same sound fills us with dread at the ever-increasing pile of obligations landing on our electronic plate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Email overload. It would be nice to blame this email overload entirely on spam but spam is only part of the problem. Every day we get all kinds of junk mail in our snail mail boxes as well, but most of us are not filling our homes with piles of unwanted mail.

Why are we able to effectively handle the volume of mail that comes to us via snail mail but not with our email boxes? Why do we not leave even a small pile of paper mail unprocessed on our kitchen counters while at the same time our email in-boxes sag with thousands of unprocessed emails? What effect is this email overload having on our practices, our stress levels, and our lives?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

You can have an email inbox that is empty at the end of each day. You can experience a greater sense of control and peace of mind knowing that not one email has come into your inbox without being processed by you. Best of all, you can do this without spending a single extra dollar, without hiring a consultant, and by spending less – not more – time on dealing with your email.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not. You have to earn this state of enhanced control by approaching your email inbox in a whole different way. You have to break the bad habits that got your inbox in its current state of disarray and replace those habits with a system that will work to keep your inbox organized and processed.

You have to triage your inbox.

Triage is a medical term for sorting wounded patients by priority order so that finite resources can be spent properly to save the maximum number of lives. You may remember scenes from the TV show “M.A.S.H.” where the doctors and nurses laid out all of the wounded patients in the compound and quickly evaluated them to decide which patients needed to be operated on immediately and which were stable enough to wait for a few hours. That’s triage.

This isn’t rocket science. Triage is what you have been doing to the snail mail that comes into your house every night: you sort it quickly, labeling some to be junk mail, some to be bills to be paid, etc. You probably toss the junk mail in the garbage can, put the bills on your desk to pay later and put the catalogs on your coffee table to flip through.

All you have to do is to apply this same system to your email inbox.

To control your email inbox you must learn to triage your email inbox as quickly, efficiently, and definitively as Hawkeye Pierce triages wounded. You have to evaluate each email that arrives in your inbox once – and only once! – and then quickly sort that email into the right place. Most of us delay this evaluation and sorting process costing us more time in the end. We waste time re-reading the same email multiple times before finally dealing with it and often get stuck dealing with the time-consuming impact of having not responded quickly enough.

For example, let’s suppose an important, but not urgent, email comes in from a client requiring a reply that will take time and care to write. You don’t have the time to reply at the moment, so you leave the email in your inbox and decide to come back to it later. When you return to your inbox later that email is now buried under 40 new emails – some of which are junk, some of which are as important as the previous client’s email and one of which is important and urgent. So, you respond to the urgent email and decide to come back to the other emails later. When you return to your inbox later that initial client email is now buried under 80 emails of varying degrees of importance. In all probability, you have now forgotten about the initial email entirely and will not remember it until that client – now angry that her email has gone unreturned for days – calls and leaves a voicemail that makes your cheeks blush and ears hurt. The 20 minute reply you needed to write now gets replaced with a 45 minute phone call and your previously happy client now is upset.

So, how do you prevent this from happening? How do you triage your email inbox?

First, set up a folder in your email application called “To Be Dealt With”, “TBDW”, “Action” or any other name that signals to you must remember to look in this folder regularly. I call mine TBDW.

Second, every time a new email comes in, follow this 3 Step Triage process:

1) Once you have read the email decide: are you done with it or does it require further action?

a. If you are done with the email, decide if you need it any more:

i. If you won’t need it any more, move it to your trash now.

ii. If you may need it again some day, move it out of your inbox into a storage (but not your TBDW) folder now.

b. If the email requires further action, decide what you need to do with it:

i. If you need to do something that takes less than 30 seconds (such as reply with a simple “yes” or “no”) do that action now.

ii. If you need to do something that takes more than 30 seconds (like make a phone call or send a longer reply) move that email to your “TBDW” folder now.

2) Repeat with every email in your inbox until your inbox is empty.

3) Scan and process your TBDW folder several times a day and deal with the emails as you have the time to do so.

If you triage your email, you will know that: junk emails will always be deleted immediately; email that you need to keep but don’t need right away will always be stored immediately; email that requires follow up action will always be in your TBDW folder; and your inbox will always only contain new emails which can be quickly processed.

Better get to it. I just heard your email inbox “ding.”

Friendly Canadian and SEO expert about town, Steve Matthews, is editing a new column that is making its way into ABA Law Practice Magazine.  The column is called LegalWEB2.0 and it will focus on finding and exploring web 2.0 tools that are pragmatic and ready to plug into your practice.  (If you're not sure what web 2.0 means, here's a good primer.)

The first installment of the column is particularly excellent, as you can plainly tell from the screenshot below: