As you settle into this long weekend and think about the new habits, rhythms and rituals you’ll use to have an incredible September 15 to December 15 (see Halcyon Days), one of the most overwhelming “essential business” tools you’ll need an approach for is your email.

Yes, we tackled this in Jarvis, working with AI and other tools to triage for you. And yes, there are other helpful systems and tools that want to help you tackle this (Gmail’s Important-first inbox, SaneBox, Superhuman), and I’ve even tried virtual assistants more than once. They can help, but they still miss a few critical things.

I appreciated the feedback from some of you on the last article. I’m glad you thought it had some good stuff, and I also heard that it was too long for an email. I plan to address this going forward: the longer pieces will go to Substack, and I’ll do a better job of extracting a few pithy points for the newsletter, so that I’m not the one keeping you in your email too long.

So in that spirit, today I thought we’d focus on just a few email hacks that I hope will help you calm the chaos. You don’t need to do all of these - pick the ones you think will help you.

1. Batch process, then triage with time in mind. Batching your email processing can help give you back focus time. A trusted triage that knows how much time you actually have helps more. This is explored in detail in the Jarvis video. As always, none of this touches patient care: this is only for non-patient email, and all clinical and secure communication stays within the organization’s secure systems. Two cautions. If you point your own AI agent at email, you need an answer to the Lethal Trifecta: an agent that reads untrusted content, can see your private data, and has permission to send can be tricked into leaking your data. If you are going to work with a person for this, security and confidentiality matter, and you should make sure they know when your deep work time is and that protecting it is part of their job.

2. Decide how much time you WANT to spend on email. Give yourself communication and collaboration timeblocks, and use buffer or flex blocks with intentional timers to help you change the question from how much time did I spend on email? to how much time DO I WANT to spend on email? Yes, it’s hard, and yes, being responsive matters (hack 3 is how you stay responsive without getting lost in your inbox), but if you don’t block time to deal with the email deluge, it will steal your deep work time as well, because your brain will keep worrying about it.

3. Use some kind of Important and Other filter. The automated tools I mentioned above can help, but most make you live in their interface. Since I prefer the super-efficient MailMate, I can’t use them, but a really efficient filter is either a VIP filter (Apple Mail supports this - you mark contacts as VIP and get an inbox that is just email from them), or the one I use, a replies-to filter (which shows me all the inbox messages that are replies to something I sent).

4. Sort by From when you’re clearing in bulk. Most email can be dealt with very quickly, and sorting by sender can make this faster still. See How I process 1000 emails in an hour (video).

These hacks can really help. The next two power moves are what get you out of “starred-email hell” and leave you feeling that your email is well in hand.

5. Turn the hard emails into tasks. Some emails are actually long or difficult tasks disguised as a message. Starring these or leaving them in your inbox is an anti-pattern: they become dread-anchors that constantly stop you from feeling you have “handled” your email. Get these into your task trust system and timeblock them. In MakeTimeFlow you just forward the email to tasks@maketimeflow.com and put your plan for handling it in the subject line using the task text format: where you want it (today, next or later), how long you plan to work on it, and when (if you want to timeblock it). For example:

becomes

That timeblocks it for an hour next Wednesday at 2pm.

6. Go guilt-free with a read-it-later service. Use one that you can simply forward the interesting-but-not-now emails to. I use Readwise: it gives me an email address I can forward to, and then I read it later (if ever). Without it, you star the email, or leave it in your inbox, and it crowds out what you really need to be doing.

One more thing: quick decisions and fast turnarounds are a skill, and skills can improve with training. With today’s email volume, the GTD rule (under two minutes? just do it) can still eat hours of your day. Even David Allen (GTD’s author) warns that “you shouldn’t become a slave to spending your day doing two-minute actions” (Getting Things Done, 2015 ed., p. 134). But for many things, you can get better at deciding and replying faster. We can explore this later if you are interested (reply faster to this email - quickly ;-)).

Enjoy the long weekend. I hope you find ways to flow through your email and communications, and are more and more able to find the time to unlock your amazing human potential.

Yours in flow,
Narath.