Using artificial intelligences (AI) to get the job done

Considering your job description and objectives, tasks such as writing and processing emails and social media likely aren’t explicitly included. So, why is it that these activities consume more than half of our workday? About six years ago, feeling bogged down and drained by the incessant flow of emails, I made a conscious decision to revolutionize my approach to managing my inbox

In this blog post, I provide insights gleaned from my extensive experience navigating the intricacies of email management. While I offer my journey as inspiration, I refrain from presenting it as the definitive solution. Accompanying the discussion are links to downloadable Shortcuts and Keyboard Maestro macros, enhancing accessibility to the tools that have proven effective in my approach. While acknowledging the abundance of existing discourse on email processing, I share my personal strategies that have yielded tangible results, recognizing that individual effectiveness may vary.

As you can notice, I use familiar aviation concepts (e.g., “platform,” “prepare for flight,” “take off,” “in-flight,” etc.) to create a structured flow (and I love aviation). I prioritize safety and the workflows/ standards used in the aviation industry. I also need to be safe with email and cannot miss any “check and balance” in processing mail.

The setup for iPad and iPhone are the same, meaning I can work device independent in the same way:

This post will cover the following topics:

• The email challenge – the problem
• How Artificial Intelligence Comes to the rescue – the help
• How I manage the email – the flow
• Guideline for using email in an organization – for inspiration

The email challenge

Agree upon guidelines for email

During my tenure leading various organizations, I consistently found it perplexing that despite dedicating over 50% of our valuable human capital to email processing, there existed no established guidelines or training programs to enhance proficiency in this critical aspect of work. To address this gap and inspire change, I’ve included with this blog post a comprehensive concept guideline for effectively managing email communications:

1. Tips when to e-mail or when not to e-mail;
2. How do you compose the correct e-mail?;
3. What is the best way to read e-mail?;
4. Other points for attention.

You can find this guideline here.

Intention matters

The intention behind an email can reveal significant insights into your organization’s collaborative dynamics and effectiveness in pursuing shared objectives. Allow me to elaborate further. The challenge lies in the sheer expansiveness of email communication. My inbox is inundated with messages from various sources:

• Colleagues acting with genuine intentions, seeking collaboration or sharing valuable information;
• Some colleagues adopt a defensive stance, ensuring they have documented their actions to deflect blame if issues arise;
• Others attempt to delegate tasks outside of their purview, effectively shifting their responsibilities onto others;
• And a substantial portion originates from automated systems or individuals who disregard the value of your time and energy.

Navigating this diverse landscape of intentions underscores the need for strategic email management practices to streamline communication and foster productivity.

💡 Tip: look at your mail from a tactical point of view at first. What is the intention behind sending this email? That will determine your answer and “tone of voice.” I even tag email so I can assess the Health of my organization.

Let email not determine your time spend

Each email, regardless of its intent, carries with it a sense of urgency that often eclipses our primary responsibilities—fulfilling the duties outlined in our job descriptions, achieving objectives, or even nurturing personal connections with ourselves and our loved ones.

💡Tip: Do not let email consume your precious time too much. Plan in your schedule/ calendar time for processing email, according to your needs (f.e. two times 45 minutes). The other time is for doing your job.

Determine if email is the right way to communicate

The more you engage in email, the more email engages you. Every email could result in many more emails on the same topic in the coming days. I prefer to have personal contact (Phone, Zoom/ MS Teams, personal “face to face” conversation), 70% of communication is non-verbal, which you miss in email.

💡Tip: send and reply on email in such a way that there are no open endings and communications/ debate “stops here”. Do use a “standard” structure of composing and answering mail.

💡Do not discuss topics by email: it could take weeks of lead time to finish the discussion, pick up the phone or do a short zoom meeting, and you are done with the debate in a couple of minutes. (and personal contact creates more energy/ fun.)

Email inbox is not your Inbox on “stuff to do”

Imagine going back to a time when we relied on carrier pigeons or snail mail for communication. Handling paper mail followed a simple workflow:

1. Retrieve mail from your mailbox;
2. Sort through it, discarding what’s unnecessary;
3. Read, perhaps scan for later reference, and take necessary actions like paying bills or responding to invitations;
4. Most importantly, you wouldn’t stuff everything back into the mailbox.

However, I found myself guilty of this very behavior with email some years ago, treating it as an endless to-do list. Each time we return to our email clients, we’re confronted with the same messages we left behind, alongside a fresh influx of new emails. It’s a relentless cycle of reading, deciding, and action that can quickly become overwhelming.

Moreover, email clients are designed to keep us engaged, particularly platforms like Google, which thrive on our continued interaction. Yet, it’s important to recognize that email is fundamentally a communication tool, not a task management system.

💡 Tip: process/ answer mail immediately. If the time of processing is over 3 minutes and it can wait a little while, put it on your to-do list in your task manager of choice.

In my work currently, I receive on average 173 mails per day (weekends included). I handle 6-7 email accounts (work, businesses I own, assignments, and privately). I had to switch off notifications on all my devices and needed some Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help me handling these amounts of emails.

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How Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes to the rescue

There is already a lot written about AI. For reference behind my email setup, I will mention two tools I am using.

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How I manage email – the flow

Organisation of mailboxes

Every mail box has a “standard” setup, as follows:

One (smart mailbox) over all 6 mail accounts

Because Sanebox is working on a server (email remains on your company servers), the initial processing takes place for all your devices, in my case Mac, iPad and iPhone but if you use other equipment, it works the same. On the Mac I am using Smart folders to collect all six similar folders into one folder. This looks like below:

It has the same structure as all the other 6 mailboxes. The following flow I have:

• 🛫 👔 Not reached mailbox is a collection all not reached notification. This cleaning is also part of the Reveille routine;
• The smart mailbox 🛫 📨 Inbox is the collection of all Inbox mailboxes from all my mail accounts. If a person is not mailing me frequently or is new/ no contact, is will moved by SaneBox in the mailbox ✈️ 🕰 Later;
• ✈️ 🧩 Replied to follow up is a mailbox collecting all mail which I received a reply on but not yet archived;
• ✈️ ☕️ Waiting for: How do I know if I am awaiting a reply? SaneBox moves copies of the sent email in this folder, in my case 3 days after sending, until I receive a reply from each To recipient. You can choose how many days you want to wait:
  • Please don’t put emails in this folder. SaneBox will remove any email that is accidentally added to this folder.
  • What if I don’t expect a reply? Simply remove the email from this folder. Or, I can add “NNTR” (no need to reply), “NRN” (no reply necessary), or “FYI” to your subject, and SaneBox will ignore that sent email.
• The smart mailbox ✈️ ⤴️ CC is holding all the emails I am cc’d on;
• In the smart view “🛫 Take off,” I find all “remaining” inbox items. The AI determined that these need immediate attention (and is pretty accurate in doing so). I answer immediately, or if it takes more than 3 minutes, I transfer it to my task manager, in my case OmniFocus, with a simple keyboard shortcut.
• 🛬 📰 News prof is holding all professional news messages I want to scan in my role as a Professional Human;
• The smart folder 🚉 💶 Financials is containing all invoices/ receipts which I need to process still;
• A lot of email notifications are about deliveries of packages, and all these emails are collected here 🚉 📦 Orders & deliveries;
• In the folder 🚉 🤝 Sales are all cold- and warm leads I collect by being subscribed to many newsletter;
• For all the applications I am using or have used, you receive update notifications. I collect these here: 🚉 🌤 Updates;
• All social updates like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc are collected in 🚉 🐥 Social;
• In the folder 🚉 📰 News, others, and all other newsletter subscriptions are collected.
• Etc…

I do this a couple of times per day, and is planned in my agenda. Max 45 minutes.

I am also tagging mail to my role-based setup:

Archiving

At first, I archived all emails in one folder: the Archive folder. The search functions of the email clients are so good that I can find everything back, so why bother to build a subfolder structure? However, I was missing the possibility of analyzing what I communicated on a Project (=goal) or not (or could not remember exactly what to search for in 210k+ email Archives).

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Guideline for e-mail handling in organisations

Below you will find a template for a mail guideline for organisation. You can use this as inspiration, make it your own, adjust to your needed “tone of voice”.

E-mail Etiquette – Less is more

The purpose of this e-mail guideline is:

• to limit the amount of e-mail circulating within our organisation to the essentials; 
• make optimal use of the unique properties of e-mail;
• achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness;
• improve mutual communication.

The use of e-mail is currently not optimal. On average, we spend (too) much time on e-mail and often determine our daily priorities through the notifications in our mailbox, not by the objectives we have set for our organisation. 

You probably also often conclude that you have been e-mailing about a specific subject for days, while if you had picked up the phone, it could have been ready in 5 minutes. Some colleagues look every day at a mailbox of around 500+ unread e-mails, which is not very motivating.

A guideline will work if we all use it as a guideline in our daily work, and this means that you can and must hold each other accountable for compliance with these guidelines. Below you will find the guidelines for:

1. Tips when to e-mail or when not to e-mail 
2. How do you compose the correct e-mail
3. What is the best way to read e-mail?
4. Other points for attention.

Ad 1) Tips for the use of e-mail.

• If walking into a colleague or calling is just as easy/efficient, don’t use e-mail. Besides, personal contact makes working much more fun. Time for a joke and a laugh, but also to add depth to your work. You cannot achieve this via e-mail;
• Save questions such as “how are you?” and “how was your weekend” for other times such as at the proverbial coffee machine, in the hallway, or during lunch;
• Never use e-mail to express irritation or other negative emotions to your colleagues. If there is a disagreement, talk it over with a cup of coffee/tea, where you can look each other in the eye. If there is no other option, save your e-mail message as a draft and look at it again after a few hours with a fresh, calm look, straight in the eye. 
• If you have to negotiate about a specific topic, the mail is less suitable for this;
• If the subject is complex or sensitive, it is better to discuss this in a personal conversation. It can take days to make a point clear by e-mail via question and answer/explanation;
• In general, the more urgent the message, the more e-mail is not a suitable medium;
• Do not use mail to initiate (delegate) actions with others. Only use this when you have a verbal agreement on the action to be taken, and you want to confirm it by e-mail;
• Avoid joint e-mail exchanges with “thank you” and “you’re welcome,” etc…

Ad 2) Compose the correct e-mail.

If you choose to communicate via e-mail, try to compose the e-mail so that the reader can understand the message with little text. Be direct and write what you want. Leave out any “political” sensitivities (then it is better to communicate verbally).

Compose an e-mail

• Consider whether an e-mail is indeed the best medium for the message you want to send (see above). Use of the telephone, personal contact, a meeting or the canteen and other locations is often more effective;
• Only copy people if the message is relevant and always explain why the employee is in the CC. If you can’t explain this, then don’t CC; 
• Try to use a fixed structure in the mail as follows:
  • Paragraph 1: background and reason why you are sending this e-mail;
  • Paragraph 2: goal – what you want to achieve by e-mail;
  • Paragraph 3: approach – what you expect in terms of action/feedback, in what way, and the timeline within which;
• Preferably ask one question per message; 
• Keep messages concise and business-like by:
  • Pay attention to a good, meaningful subject line. No subject line is not allowed; 
  • To formulate to the point (take just a bit more time for that); telegram style is permitted;
• Not to send attachments if the relevant documents can be published on the Shared disk, intranet, or SharePoint, then only the link; 
• Send messages without formatting (so no bells and whistles, such as colors, different fonts, smileys, backgrounds, and colourful signatures); 
• Only use humor in exceptional cases; a difference in interpretation can quickly lead to misunderstandings; 
• Reread your e-mail critically before pressing the send button and enable spell check;
• Formulate what you expect from the other (a reaction, an action, an answer). Also, indicate if the message is for information and the recipient does not have to respond;

When replying to an e-mail

• Respond preferably within one but no more than two working days to e-mail messages from colleagues. If you are absent for a more extended period, use the Out of Office.
• Explicitly state what you will be doing and when in response to the message. In your reply, delete irrelevant passages if you quote parts of the original message (with the familiar> characters)
• If there are several questions in the mail to answer, dedicate each paragraph to one answer with the section’s bolded question. Answer them all or indicate if you cannot. In other words, don’t let things “hang”;
• Indicate at the bottom of your message – if relevant – when you can be reached on which number so that the recipient can respond to your message in a way other than by e-mail.

Ad 3) Reading messages:

• In principle, only open each e-mail once. It may be one of the most challenging things. Because how often do you open an e-mail and then think that you will look at it at a later time. It happens that messages are opened twice or three times. Time and again, you have to delve into the text again. Precious time, memory, and energy are lost.
• Keep wondering what the core of the message is:
  • a question: answer the question immediately if possible;
  • an assignment/request: work this out directly if this can be done within 3 minutes; otherwise, put it in your to-do list and or plan the job in your calendar and communicate back when you are going to do this;
  • inform: read through or print important information that you need to consult several times or archive in the document database;
• Keep your inbox organized. The inbox should only contain messages that you have yet to read (unread):
  • keep the inbox organized by archiving messages immediately after you have answered and finished them;
  • if you have given the activity resulting from the action a place on your to-do list or in your calendar (you can then open the message from the archive as soon as you start working on the task in question);
  • if you have printed them out because you want the information on paper to hand; 
• Take the time once a day (plan this in your agenda) to empty your inbox to start with a clean slate the following day. 
• Never use your inbox as a to-do list. You will never get your work done. Schedule in your calendar or move an e-mail to Tasks / Tasks in Outlook;

Ad 4) Other points for attention

• Turn off your e-mail notification. This signal that sounds as soon as a message arrives distracts from work and disturbs others working in your room; 
• Take action if you spend more than an hour a day sending and replying to the e-mail. Is all that e-mail part of your task and objectives, can you “cut back” on e-mail, can you handle your e-mail more efficiently ?;
• Talk to each other! For this guideline to work optimally, you may alert colleagues who ‘sin’ against it by referring to this document. Do this in a friendly manner: “I would like to refer you to our e-mail guideline.” Or “I know you mean well, but I’d rather not receive jokes.”

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