- You may get stressed out by email, overwhelmed even.
Endless tasks, infinite newsletters, and spam galore.
Well, what if I told you that everything you're doing
when it comes to your inbox is wrong
and that by following a few simple steps
you could change everything, saving you hours each week?
Or you could just light your laptop on fire.
So I realize this is not exactly
the sexiest topic in the world to talk about.
Email can be a little bit boring,
but I think it's really important,
and that's the reason I'm making this video
because when it comes to your productivity,
email can be your best friend or your worst enemy.
I wanna really get into the what and the why.
So why am I setting up these systems?
What does it really look like?
Not so much the how.
You can figure out the how with
a couple quick Google searches,
but I genuinely geek out about this stuff.
I love talking about the systems and the tactics
and the nitty-gritty things that really help to make my life
efficient and then save me a whole lot of stress,
and most importantly, time.
So let's just get right into it.
First, I think it's important to talk
about how we typically use email.
It can often be a source of distraction.
We constantly check it multiple times every hour,
and that repetitive checking can slow us down
and pull us away from our work.
By choosing to batch emails once or twice a day,
if your current work allows it,
you'll be able to quickly fly through emails
and spend more time in the flow of work.
In truth, this is an ideal that I don't always live up to.
I often find myself stuck in my inbox repeatedly
checking over and over again throughout the day,
and that's okay, but when I do this,
I definitely find myself being more productive,
more in flow.
One of the ways that I avoid my inbox and also help myself
to move the needle on certain projects
is to create a shortcut on Google Chrome.
So this bookmark here is to compose email.
When I click it, it will open a dialog
that allows me to write an email message.
The great thing about it is that I can skip my inbox
and send important emails to get projects moving forward.
So if you use Gmail, I've got a link in the description
so you can just copy and paste that
into your own bookmarks and it will work.
With everything in this video and videos in the future,
all of the references are gonna be
in the description down below.
So let's get right into my actual email inbox.
So this is usually what I see when I login to Gmail.
I'll have 10 to 15 emails in my inbox,
some of them new, a few of them have been read,
but are tasks and things that I need to do in the future.
I often use email to manage tasks.
A lot of times emails are very simple, quick responses,
but sometimes they require 30 minutes, 60 minutes of work.
I have to compress out and upload
a video that might take me hours.
And so, sometimes I will take these
tasks and put 'em on a to-do list.
That's really if I'm being OCD
and I wanna get to inbox zero.
A lot times I'll just leave 'em right in my inbox,
and then, eventually over the coming days
as I find time for it I will get to them.
If it's in my inbox, it will get done,
it will get responded to.
The trick is that I don't let everything
get into my inbox to begin with.
I'll talk about that in just a second,
but first, I wanna cover some basics.
So I've enabled a feature called auto-advance,
which means that when I delete, archive, or reply
to a message it's gonna automatically
take me to the next email in line.
I also turned on this feature called send and archive,
so whenever I reply to a email,
it will automatically archive it, removing it from my inbox.
This way I can just quickly do a pass through all my emails,
cleaning up my inbox as I go.
As you'll see on the left-hand side of the screen
I've created labels for different categories of email.
The search function in Gmail is really powerful,
but it can only go so far.
Creating and managing emails through labels
can really help you find items and information
from projects that occur over the course of months.
So every time I get an email related to our wedding
I drag it into the wedding label.
All receipts from my business go in the receipts label,
and travel, itinerary, and tickets can be found under
travel 2020 in the designated destination label.
This has saved me a lot of headaches during travel.
I also have a label called subscriptions
that are the newsletters that I subscribe to.
So on that note, I am absolutely ruthless
when it comes to unsubscribing from emails.
If I buy a sweater and somebody puts me
on their newsletter without my permission,
I get very upset,
I will mark you as spam and I'll unsubscribe.
Get outta my inbox.
That's just one way that I'm able
to keep my email clutter-free.
Some of the labels like incoming, podcast, and newsletter
are how I organize all my unique email addresses.
I have multiple email addresses,
and all of them filter into one of these labels.
Incoming is my email address for people who reach out
to me via the contact page on my website.
Newsletter is another unique email
that I have set up for my newsletter.
Podcast is my email address that I use
for all of my podcast-related activities.
All of these email addresses help me to keep track
of incoming opportunities so I don't miss anything
and reply to people who wanna get in touch with me.
The most important step I've taken to keep
all of this organized is to create filters for each
of these email addresses so they automatically skip my
inbox and go directly into one of these designated labels.
This is an automated system.
You set it up once, and now,
all your emails automatically filter into a specific label.
This is a absolute game changer,
and it has saved me so much time, and also,
gotten me to be really clear on what emails I'm checking
and what mindset I'm in when I'm checking them.
In addition to setting up filters for my different
email addresses I've also created one
for the newsletters I subscribe to.
So all of these newsletters automatically
filter into my subscription label.
So one thing that I started to do just a couple
months ago is whenever a receipt comes
into my inbox and it's something,
a place that I know I'm gonna be
purchasing from again for business,
say it's a coffee shop,
it's a place where I get cameras from,
it's an Amazon purchase,
I wanna make sure that automatically
filters into my receipts.
To do that, I just take the email address that it came from,
and then, I put it on that filter.
And then, I can just continue to add as many
email addresses as I want to that specific
filter sending everything to receipts.
That's a tip that I got from Thomas Frank,
so thank you much sir, thank you my sir.
Let's talk about templates.
If you find yourself constantly writing the same email
over and over and over again you can use templates
to save you hours of drafting the same exact message.
I've created a few template responses
to commonly asked questions that I get.
Sometimes I'll tweak and customize them,
but even having a starting point
of a response saves me a ton of time.
Let's look at some examples.
If someone didn't get my newsletter,
this happens pretty often,
it's usually in their spam folder,
so I have a reply for that.
Back when we released our documentary "Minimalism"
I would get screening requests every week.
This template definitely saved me a bunch of time.
So to finish up here, there's two more features
that I wanna talk about that have really helped me a lot.
This used to be a extra plugin,
an extra app that you had to use to install into Gmail,
but now it's built natively in,
so it certainly saves me a lot of time.
The first one is called snooze.
So I can use the snooze button to remove something
from my inbox for a period of time,
say until I can get to the request next week,
or it can be used to remind me of when
someone doesn't respond to my email,
which again, is hugely helpful so I don't need to keep track
of all of the communications that went unreplied to.
You can also now schedule emails with Gmail,
which is something that I used to do a lot
when I was younger and I would procrastinate on projects.
There would be those nights when I'd be up
until 3 AM the day before a project was due,
and I didn't want to look like a total piece a crap
by sending my client this email at 3 or 4 AM
when I finished up so I would simply just schedule
it for the morning at 8 or 9 AM,
and now I don't look like a dead shit,
I look like somebody who's got my shit together.
So that works out really well.
I don't do that much anymore.
I've kind of got things together at this point
so I don't procrastinate as much,
but hey, if you're a younger version of me,
this will help you a lot.
I also use this now if I'm scheduling social media
content to someone who has appeared
on my YouTube channel like I just showed you.
Instead of sending the email one month
before the video goes live or having to remember
or set a reminder to do it I can craft the email,
schedule it, post all the media files,
and then, send it to them a few days before it goes live.
Super convenient.
And that is it.
That's the end of this video.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
I really appreciate you sticking around
and taking an interest in email.
This, I hope, was an interesting video.
I was afraid to make this video.
I was like, I can't really make a video about email, can I?
Can I?
I should, I must, have to.
Did it.
Thanks for watching.
If you want more videos from me, go to Instagram.
I've been making a lot of videos on Instagram TV
behind the scenes talking a little bit more
about these kinda things and what goes into 'em.
I don't know why I touched my head like that.
Weird, see you guys.
Thanks for watching, bye.
Are you still there?
You're still there, huh?
(mellow R&B music)