If you feel like your inbox is an endless swamp of thankless tasks, this is the episode for you! Today I talk about the problem with how we think about our emails and how we can make them much less painful. This is not your usual productivity hacks!
**Also, here is the "Part-time wellness" podcast with Chelsea Uithoven that I recommend in the podcast**
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode three of the PhD Life Coach. What would you say if I asked you to show me your email inbox now? Would you be like, Yeah, sure. Have a look. There’s a few you haven't replied to, but other than that, all under control. No worries. Would you have that lurch of shame? Of dread where you're, No, you can't look in there. There's so many messages I haven't read.
How would you feel right now if you looked at mine? I'd let you look. It's kind of full of delivery notes for things that we are buying for our new house and lots of different emails from different coaches that I follow and things like that. It's kind of messy, but not as bad as it used to be when I was an academic, I have to say.
So this episode is all about email and it's one of the things that people talk about most when they're an academic, whether you're a PhD student or through the full professor, wherever you sit in the academic tree. We all think we have too much email and I want to get right up front.
This is not going to be a how to hack your email sort of episode. This is not going to be a try this system, try labeling it like that, try tagging it, like that kind of a session. All that stuff's good. You can look into that stuff if you want to, but really we are going to try and get to some of the root causes of why email causes are so much pain and what we can actually do about it beyond looking for more and more solutions. It's a little bit like last week where we were talking about planners and how planners don't necessarily fix the situation.
If you haven't listened to that episode, check out episode two about why you don't need another planner. But today, emails.
So I want you to think about how you think. About your emails, what thoughts you have when I ask you about your emails. Ones I hear myself come up with, and ones that my clients come up with are things like I'm drowning. It's endless. I'll never make it through all these emails. I shouldn't have to do this. That's a big one. There's too much email. I can't do my job. And there's elements of, everyone wants a piece of me as well. So think about which of those thoughts you have. I bet you have at least some of them most days.
I certainly did. And I want you to then think about what effect those thoughts have. Because those thoughts may well be true. You may well have an endless supplier of emails. It may well prevent you doing other parts of your job, but we're going to think about more practical solutions later. But even if those things are true, I want you to think about what effect that has on you.
So when I was still an academic, I was a full professor until August, 2022. And I definitely didn't master the whole email thing, and I'm not sure anybody does. I would get very overwhelmed, with my emails. And so thoughts about them being endless about never being able to get through them.
All those sorts of things can really make you feel overwhelmed, and when you're overwhelmed, it causes procrastination. This was something I saw in myself a lot. I would avoid doing my emails, I'd even avoid people who had sent me emails that I knew I hadn't replied to out of this overwhelm of just how many there were, and it stopped me kind of getting on and dealing with some of the ones that were there.
I'm sure that's something you've experienced as well. Another thing I saw was that resentment, frustration almost, that I shouldn't have to deal with all of this, this, this thought that I shouldn't have this many emails, it's in some way wrong, would lead to lots of frustration, resentment, and again, that didn't lead to me getting on with things that led to me getting cross, it led to me venting.
So you, wherever you go in a university, you'll find people moaning about having too many emails. And I'm all for letting emotions out. I'm all for processing our emotions, but venting isn't necessarily processing them. Venting where you end up feeling at least as cross, if not more crossed than you started, isn't releasing that emotion. It's not processing that emotion. If anything, it's reinforcing it and making it a habitual emotion that you always feel resentful about your emails.
The other thing I think that these sorts of frustration and overwhelm, even shame can lead to is what I recently heard referred to as frantic action.
So Chelsea Uithoven who runs the Part-time Wellness podcast, which I would really recommend, once again, it is aimed at people with adhd, but I think there's tons of good value in there for people no matter what your brain makeup is, whether you consider yourself neurotypical or neurodivergent. She referred to it as frantic action, and this is the sort of action that comes from a place of stress, of overwhelm, of shame that just sort of, Oh my God, I just need to get it done.
And I thought that was a really, really interesting phrase for it, because sometimes it feels like these emotions generate good productivity from us, that we go and get lots of stuff done because we're feeling stressed and anxious and things. But often when it's that sort of frantic action, it doesn't feel good.
And it often doesn't involve pausing and thinking, is this actually the best way of dealing with this? So it's bashing through loads and loads of emails without thinking about whether there's a way you could actually reduce the number of emails you've got, or whether there's ways that you could avoid filling up other people's.
It's just, I need to get through these bash bash bash. Okay. So, and that's why thinking about how we think about things is so important because our thoughts about email generate these emotions, which then dictate our behaviors. So we are going to think about what thoughts you could have about emails that would be more helpful.
But before we do massive disclaimer. We, in this style of coaching, we often think of circumstances is inherently neutral and that it's only made positive or negative by the thoughts that we have about them. And I do believe that to some extent, but I'm going to give you my get outta jail free card here.
I also believe that academics, everyone at universities have too many emails. We have tons of emails that, if we processed them the way we sometimes tell ourselves or other people tell us, we have to process them, would use up portions of our day, that probably would take away from other parts of our. Okay, so this is not going to be an a podcast where I say, If you just think like this about emails, you'll be able to get them all done and it'll all be fine.
That's not what this is about. This is not a passive resilience sort of a podcast. That's not what I'm here for. What I'm here for though is to stop you making it more painful than it needs to be. And to get you into a mindset where you can accept the bits that are inevitable and actually get on with them in as pain free way as possible and actually change the bits that are rubbish and shouldn't be the way they are.
Okay? So we're not building passive resilience here. We are just not layering on any more rubbish than we have to. So what I want you to really kind of ponder on is not just your views about emails, but what do you make it mean about you? So when you think, I've got so many emails, I'm so behind on replying to people, what do you make that mean about you as a person?
My guess is there'll be a big portion of you that will make that mean that you're not doing your job very well, that you're not good at this, that you are letting people down, that maybe you're being selfish because you're prioritizing other things. We make these circumstances mean something about us, and that leads to even more difficult emotions than your kind of frustration and resentment, those sorts of things.
That starts leading to things like shame, where we are judging ourselves as a person, and that makes it even harder to get on with these things, makes it even harder to like ourselves and have good mental health.
The other side is, making it mean something about your institution or your sector. So I see people fall one or two ways.
They either make it mean that they're not good enough and that they just need to do more, and that other people are able to manage this and if they just work harder, they'll be able to do it. Or they make it mean that academia is broken. I have so many emails. Academia is not what it used to be.
Shouldn't be like this. It's all rubbish. They make it mean something about the sector, and that then leads to hopelessness and things like that, leads to anger at the changes in the sector. And again, those sorts of emotions usually only lead to venting, moaning about it, and essentially becoming part of the problem.
So what I want us to think about is, what do we even mean by being on top of our emails, and what thoughts could we have about our emails that make it less painful and more effective at the same time?
So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to think back. If you haven't listened to my first episode yet, I want you to go back and listen to that at some point where we talk about how to be your best supervisor, how to manage yourself the best you can.
Two of the things I talk about in that are compassion and curiosity, and that's what we're going to channel while we address this problem. And I've really, I want you to think of is that this is one issue we're thinking about, email. That's something that people find challenging, but actually the approach we're taking, you can take with anything that you find challenging in your job.
So we are thinking about the problem of email. If you're finding something else difficult, you can do the same strategy. So our strategy is compassion, curiosity and compassion starts with acceptance. It starts with the fact no one's on top of their email. Course they're not. Do you think anybody who's like, Oh yes, I get a perfectly manageable amount of emails, it's fine.
All good. No one is on top of their emails, and what that means is our definition of “on top” is completely stupid. Okay. If everybody's behind, we are not behind. It's just where we are. This is just how we do it. That's fine. You're not a bad academic because you haven't replied to those students. The system isn't broken because your manager sends you too many emails.
We get a bunch of emails. We have thoughts about it. We do some actions. Okay. No one is on top. We don't have to make this mean anything about ourselves and our capabilities. We don't have to make this mean anything about the system being inherently broken. We can just accept that at the moment, we get whatever number of emails a day, and we need to figure out a way of managing it better than we are doing at the moment.
Okay, so compassion is coming at it from the point of view, accepting this is what it is, and accepting that's totally understandable where you are at with it. It's understandable that it's difficult to go through a whole bunch of emails, usually about loads of different topics. You know, if you're a PhD student, you probably get emails from your supervisor, maybe participants if you're doing human studies, archivists, all those sorts of things, technicians perhaps.
And then you get all the emails from the university, which are meant to help you, but often just pile up in your inbox. So about the career service and about the wellbeing service and the whatever else service that you have access to and the events that are happening, and da da. It's no wonder it's hard to process this stuff.
There's load off 'em and they're all about different things and all of them require you to think. It's not a surprise. It's okay.
So some of it is that kind of compassionate thinking that of course this is a bit hard and that's okay. I can get some of this done. That's the next bit is rather than thinking, I'm terrible if I don't get this all done, I'm letting these people down is thinking I can answer some of these.
I go bash through ten now, let's go. I'm actually really looking forward to helping this student. Let's sort that one out. Because often when we think about email as this catch-all term, no one likes doing email. Do you like responding to a collaborator about a paper you're writing? Yeah, you probably do.
Do you like answering questions from a student? Yeah. Often you like that too. Do you like receiving your emails about events? Yeah, sometimes they're interesting events. That's nice. Actually, when we look at what most of our emails about each of them is not that bad. It's just we look at them as email this huge task.
So when you look at it with compassion towards yourself and towards the emails, but I actually, those ones are ok. There's always some irritating ones. Of course there are, because we have thoughts about them too. But a whole bunch of your emails are probably parts of your job, parts of your studies that you do actually want to do.
So remembering that we're thinking with compassion all the time.
Then once we're coming from that compassionate place of, it's understandable that I find this hard but I do want to do it, so let's figure this out. We then start to move into curiosity. We start to see this as a challenge that we can try and work around.
And we can try and come up with solutions for. And again, just to reiterate, this is not going to be me giving you loads of hints about hacks that you can use to process your emails faster because the way you solve this problem isn't just by coming up with loads of new systems. That might be, you have no system whatsoever with how you manage your emails, then there are a few things, and I am gonna mention one or two.
But lots of it is about thinking about, okay, how can I, how can I nix this problem at the source? How can we actually make it so there's less emails?
So, starting out, first, it’s Know yourself. Know what elements of this you're good at, what elements of this you find more challenging.
So to give you an example, one that I've always found challenging is during a meeting I'll say to somebody, Oh, I've got a cool thing. I'll send it to you after this. And I write it down. So don't come at me with you to do lists and stuff. I write it down. I do. I write it down. But then after the meeting, I go off and do something else, and then I never come back to that bit of my to-do list.
And so I never send it. And then I feel bad. And this was something that I really struggled with for quite a while, and I would tell myself, No, you just need to make sure you do it afterwards. That kind of discipline-based approach where I say, No, you just need to do it straight after the meeting. Just make sure you do it straight after the meeting.
But discipline approaches rarely work. And I would still get distracted. I'd still went off to do something different. And so I thought, Okay, let's think about this. Curiously, let's think about this from a place of compassion. If I find that difficult, I'm just going to send it in the meeting. And so now what I do, even if I'm in a one-to-one meeting, I just say, I've got a thing.
Give me two minutes. I'm going to send it to you. Now, just hold that thought. We're going in. And I send it to them straight away. And you might think, well that's a waste of time because that person's now got to watch you send an email. And it's true, they do. And I say to them, I know this means you’ve got to just watch me send this, but trust me, this is the most efficient way of getting this done.
And actually people have been super understanding about it and if anything are super grateful because whilst it takes two minutes to watch me send this email, they would probably spend five minutes tomorrow going, Oh, I could really do with that thing that Vikki was going to send me. She hasn't sent it to me.
I wonder if I should remind her, but actually she is really busy, so I don't want to bother her and da, da da. Or sending an email to follow up and getting it from me then. So actually waiting two minutes while I do it right now, and being able to check, they can open it. Check I've sent everything I've said I would, actually works way better. And I came to that because I accepted myself and my tendencies and instead of trying to make myself different, I went okay, with me as I am, how could I do this better? And that was one of the ways that I could do it better. So that’s know yourself.
The next thing is know the issue. First thing is, how many emails do you actually get. We all talk about, we get too many emails. How many do you actually get? Knowing the answer to that really helps you sort of figure out, is it objectively more than you can manage? Are you just dramaing this up in your brain and making it into much bigger than it is? Or are there objectively loads and loads of emails? And if there are, where do they come? What proportion of them come from where? You'll probably find you have three or four sources of a big chunk of them. You'll probably find that there's types of sources.
So you might find that you've signed up for email lists. You might find there's particular people that send lots of emails, particular groups of people. And once you know those things, then you can start looking for small solutions. So one thing I found was that at different points in my academic career, I had more or fewer emails.
So while I was head of education for our department, I got objectively billions, obviously not actually objectively billions, but lots of emails. I would get two, 300 emails a day, and that's a lot to process when lots of them have got big tasks in them and things like that. At other times I had fewer, but I still in my head at all times, I thought I got lots of emails.
So knowing, have you actually got lots compared to usual is is really useful. And figuring out where they come from. Because if you can figure out where they come from, you've got a whole load of strategies ahead of you. So, unsubscribing to particular lists. Some people are a fan of setting up rules, so they go to particular folders.
My one caution with that, if you're anything like me, I don't look at those folders. So I would sometimes set up folders so that a particular type of email would always go into those folders, and then I'd find those folders and remember they existed like two months later and be like, Oh, there's a whole load of emails I haven't replied to in there.
So that can. You then need to make sure that you remember or schedule your time to go and look at those folders. One system that did work very well for me, and again, it was all connected to this thought about acceptance and not being perfect, and that was the Yesterbox system. So this came to my attention through a very good friend and colleague of mine called Emma Flint, who is an academic at Aston. And she didn't invent it, but she brought it to my attention. And yesterbox’s principles, if you Google it, you'll find all the rules that go with it or whatever, but the basic principles are answer esterday's emails. That's it. Can write a book on that apparently, but no, just answer yesterday's emails because the thing with yesterday's emails is a fixed number of emails.
So you can look and see exactly how long you're gonna need to deal with all of those. Today's emails are not fixed because you don’t know how many more are going to come today. So if you try and finish today with an empty inbox, it entirely depends on what happens towards the end of the day. If you look at yesterday's emails, you know you got 47 emails yesterday, you've got 47 emails to answer. That really helped.
It also stops you getting into that kind of ping pong where if you reply immediately, they reply immediately and it just keeps going. So yes, the box is a system that I have found very useful. So if you know the actual issue, you can look for smaller solutions. The other way I want you to look at this though, is to say, what's the bigger issue here?
So we've said, knowing ourselves, knowing the issue, but now dive in, say, what is the bigger issue here? Are you involved in too many things? So is the reason you've got too many emails because you're involved in too many different roles, is it because the meetings you're involved with aren’t efficiently running, so loads of things are done by email rather than by discussion?
Is it because there are certain people who copy you into too many messages? And if there are. What's the bigger issue there? So often we moan about people who copy us into too many emails, but are they copying us in because they're worried to make a decision for themselves because they're worried they'll get blamed or something like that.
Are they worried that people will feel left out and that actually this is their attempt to include you? Is it that the issue isn't so much that you're copied into all of them. It's that it's not made clear what you're meant to do with it. In which case, can you have a conversation about that?
Can you have a conversation with your research group, with your supervisor, with your PhD students, whatever situation you are in about how you send and structure emails to make them more useful for each other.
This really reminds me of a billboard I once saw. So this was quite a few years ago now. I was on the M6. I was driving and there was a huge billboard and it, I was stuck in traffic and the poster said To everyone else, you’re traffic. Now I can't remember who was an advert for, so I wasn't a very good advert from that perspective, but it really stuck in my head because so often in traffic we sat there going, Oh, if all these cars got outta the way, I'd be able to get on my journey.
But then, to everybody else, you are the problem. To everybody else, you are clogging up their way and the same's true with email.
Have you ever on a Friday afternoon, gone, You know what? What will really help my brain space is to clear my emails before the weekend. I'm going to clear my emails before the weekend, and sometimes that's deleting emails, but often it's replying to emails.
And so what we're essentially doing is clearing our inbox by chucking it into other people's inboxes. Now imagine. I've got a new, very empty garden at the moment. I've moved into a new build, it’s just weeds and mud with a little tiny bit of lawn coming through. Imagine if I cleared that by just throwing my weeds over the fence.
I don't think my neighbours would love that very much, but that's essentially what we do with our emails. We clear our emails by chucking them into somebody else's emails, often without much thought for how we can do that effectively. So another part of this compassion and curiosity is stopping and going, How can I send fewer emails, rather moaning about how many emails I get?
How can I send fewer emails? How can I send better emails? A few things that I found really useful are trying to keep 'em shorter. I once got told by a colleague that my emails were too long and no-one read them which was nice! Sometimes it's good to get blunt feedback. And after that I really made an effort to make it shorter.
To make the actions really clear. Other things you an do, make sure you use the subject line effectively. So don't just leave it as “re” whatever the last conversation two weeks ago was. Change that so that it's really clear. Reattach things. So particularly PhD students, if you're sending stuff to supervisors and you are saying, just following up to see if you've done comments on my manuscript.
Reattach it. Don't say, have you done comments on my manuscript that I sent you last Tuesday? Because now your supervisor's got to wander off to last Tuesday. Same for supervisors, this all goes for you too. If you're sending something to your students, have you read the paper I sent you? Or whatever?
Reattach it. Make it easy for them. Have everything in one place. I had, I've had many wonderful PhD students in my time, but I had a PhD student who was particularly good at doing this, Jo, and she would send me emails where she'd reattached the thing I needed to do, she'd remind me when the meeting was.
It was all dead subtle, it didn't sound like she was saying, I'm reminding you of this. She'd say, looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday at 3:00 PM for example. So just reemphasizing, it'll be great to go through my method section comments with you. So again, emphasizing what it was we were doing so that I could definitely prepared for it.
And she'd reattach all the things that I needed. And it just meant that instead of having 10 different emails from her, that kind of reminded me of the different things we might do in that meeting. One email that she structured out that had everything we were gonna do when we were meeting what time reattached things I needed.
It reduced my email traffic. It made it so much easier to be a better supervisor for her. So think about how can you do that. If you have people who routinely send you emails in dribs and drabs who cc in too many people, things like that, how can you have a conversation with them to try and reduce this at source?
Okay, so to conclude email is just a tool that we are using. There is probably objectively far too much of it flying around. But how we think about it really affects how we do our jobs and how well we can deal with this issue that we're all managing. If we can stay in a place of compassion for ourselves and remind ourselves the fact there's no way to do this perfectly, we are all managing within this system, and then come at it from curiosity as to, but how can I make this a little bit better. Then we're all much less likely to be drowning in our emails and focusing instead on how can we help each other swim.
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