Email is a Battlefield: Learn to Triage with Outlook

Email is a Battlefield

Okay, so that's a little extreme, right? Maybe not. I know many who'd agree that email is a huge drain on their productivity, and they fight it everyday. Like in a battle, you have to react to new situations as they are presented to you. Email happens to you—often without your control—so while you may have had a plan to complete a major project that's on your plate, other voices screaming louder can steal your attention. How does that old adage go? "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."

“No Battle Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy”

For years, I've used the term "email triage" without considering what that means. I'm sure I heard someone smarter than me say it and just worked it into my vernacular. Here's what I thought email triage meant: reading unread messages and then deleting or foldering away conversations you don't need anymore.

The Truth About Triage

Anyone in the medical industry will understand the term differently. Triage was  and still is a strategy for battlefield medicine. Triaging means giving priority to optimize your chances of success. On the battlefield (or in a crisis), potential candidates for treatment are broken into three major categories:

• Those who are likely to live, with or without treatment.
• Those who are likely to die, with or without treatment.
• Those for whom immediate treatment might make a positive difference in the outcome. These are the people you help.

You might think battle triage sounds cold or even cruel, but it's about maximizing your chances for successfully helping someone. You must dedicate resources where they can make the most impact.

This realization completely changed the way I look at my email inbox. Could I look at messages the same way? I'm going to give you some tips on how you can cut down on wasted time in your own inbox. Let's storm this beach!

#1 - Don't Start in Your Inbox

When you begin your workday, do you start by checking your email? Most experts agree you shouldn't start your day this way. After answering 20-40 emails, have you really accomplished anything that is moving your company toward it's real end goal? Likely not. We don't want to be so busy being busy that we miss the real opportunities to make an impact. Worse yet, email can be a distraction, causing you to lose site of your most important goals. Start your day deliberately with concrete goals in mind. Attack those projects head on to ensure they don't get ignored.

#2 - Organize Your Mail Differently

It's not just important to determine when you check your inbox, but how you check it. I've trained thousands of people over the years how to use their office software

. Not surprisingly, most users read emails chronologically, with no thought of priority. As a result, instead of spending 7-9 hours a week responding to emails, they spend 15 or even 20 hours! Think about that! It's weird to think that we can spend half our work week just reacting to messages others send us. 

The first thing you can do is sort differently. For example, you can sort by importance or by messages you have flagged. This will ensure high priority mail appears at the top. Better yet, you can use Search Folders to group your mail as it comes in without moving it. I've talked about Search Folders in another post, so if you're interested check my post about surviving the modern workplace.

#3 Automate Redundant Tasks

Don't waste time on redundant tasks. You want to get in and out of email quickly. Outlook introduced the concept of inbox rules over a decade ago as a way to give you more of this kind of control. What types of rules can you create? Here are a couple of ideas.

• Automatically move conversations to folders that aren't high priority
• Automatically categorize mail for easy sorting later
• Automatically forward messages from my boss that have a specific subject to the team member responsible for the project

Rules are incredibly powerful and flexible. Step back for a minute and think about your workflow—actions that take too long, or tasks you do over and over again. Rules could be the answer.

Additionally, you can use Quick Steps and Quick Parts. Unlike rules (which operate automatically), Quick Steps and Quick Parts are actions that you can have predefined (like reply to email with a pre-written message) but you then tell Outlook to perform that action(s) manually on a case by case basis.

#4 Enable Clutter Removal

Microsoft introduced a new feature into Office 365 this year called Clutter. The concept is something that has just recently become possible because of the power of cloud technology. Now, with Office 365, your software can learn the way you work and remove low priority mail (clutter) from your inbox without you having to do a thing! You will have to enable the feature first, but as you work, it learns from the signals you give it—for example, mail you continually delete without reading or conversations that you don't participate in. Outlook learns your habits and does the work of separating it out from the stuff that really matters. 

In Summary

You are most productive when you control your day. Remember these four simple ideas to help you command your day like a general instead of a private.

1. Don't start the day with email
2. Triage mail by importance first, not chronologically
3. Let Outlook do the time consuming stuff for you (enable rules, Quick Steps, Quick Parts, etc.)
4. Enable Clutter to avoid wasting time on low priority mail

About the Author: Todd Kirk is an end-user advocate and trainer from BrainStorm, Inc. We want to change the way the world works.

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