How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

MASTER THE VOLUME
How can you climb out from underneath the weight of your inbox and spend less
time on it each day? Behavioral science has a lot to say about this.
First, stop looking at your email all the time
Processing our email throughout the day—while working on a task, during
meetings, as we’re walking—makes us feel busy and efficient. But it means
we’re taking longer over it than needed. As I explained in 
multitasking forces our brains to switch attention from one task to another,
wasting time and effort whenever we flit from task to email to task again.
Instead, “batch” your emailing so that you process emails a few times every day,
not a few times every minute.
Second, filter your inbox
Just as our brain wastes time switching from tasks to email and back to tasks
again, it wastes some time by flipping between different 
types
of emails
requiring very different types of cognitive response. There are messages from
important people who want a reply, mail you’re merely cc’ed on, subscriptions,
meeting invitations, and junk of various types. They all make different types of
demands on your brain. So you can save yet more neural processing time if you

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fully exploit your email program’s capacity to filter emails into different folders,
allowing you to group together different types of email and deal with each in
turn. Here are some filters and folders you might want to create:
Email sent from individuals to you directly. If you can, separate out the
emails where you’re merely cc’ed. You can create a special folder or tab for
especially important people.
Calendar invitations should also be separated, if you get a lot of them.
Things to read. It’s easy to drown in “things someone thinks you’d find
interesting,” not to mention subscriptions that end up making you feel
burdened rather than informed. I have a folder for potentially useful research
material, and I review it once a week or even less frequently.
Third, Only Handle It Once (OHIO)
When you do engage with the email in your inbox, only handle it once. If you
revisit a message three times before replying, you’re tripling the time you’re
giving it—and, as you know, your brain has very limited deliberate system
capacity to go around. To paraphrase David Allen, the author of the marvelous
book 
Getting Things Done
, when you’re reviewing your email, aim for one of
the four D’s:
3
Do: make the decision and respond.
Delegate: if it’s something that can reasonably be handled by someone else,
forward it on.
Defer: file for future action or reference. Send an “I’ll get back to you”
response if needed.
Delete: if none of the above applies, delete.
Sometimes, despite your best intentions, you can still let an email sit in the
inbox day after day. So I take a weekly look at any long-standing email lurking
in the inbox and ask: “Is leaving this one more day going to allow me to improve
my response?” If the answer is no, I tell myself to just do it, because a short

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response is better than a late one.