Getting to inbox zero

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is an absolute pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today I'm talking about getting to inbox zero. I had a podcast episode a couple of months ago where I talked about how to manage your email inbox.

1:21 Well today I'm talking specifically about the goal of getting to inbox zero because inbox zero is like nirvana. It's like, oh my gosh, the inbox is empty. Everything is completely processed. You may snare and say, yeah, that is not my personal goal. And I applaud you because yeah, the inbox is not the thing that you should be trying to take to inbox zero every time. But I do want to acknowledge that getting to inbox zero is pretty awesome. And if you've never managed to get to inbox zero, I want you to try it at least once. And that does mean deleting a lot of emails or at least archiving them so that they're out of sight, out of mind.

2:02 But getting to inbox zero is a big, big, big deal. It's also a challenging thing because it's a goal that's not necessarily attainable. And even when it is attainable, it's not necessarily in your best interest to process all your emails to zero. So I want to share with you some thoughts I have about how to get to inbox zero and how not to let getting to inbox zero rule your whole life because it can be pretty problematic. But one thing to consider before we start to talk about inbox zero is that, oh my goodness, email is so overwhelming. And if you are like me, you have more than one email inbox. So you have your work email inbox, but you probably already have an email inbox personally.

2:43 Maybe you have a couple of personal accounts and possibly your business account. You have so many email inboxes. But in general, there's probably one or two that are primary. And you might even have some email inboxes that you don't really check anymore, even though they used to be very prominent and active and now they're not. And so it's important to recognize that you have many inboxes, but probably one or two are primary. I'm really talking specifically about the work inbox because after a while, the work inbox becomes pretty prominent, especially the longer you've been at your institution, the more emails you get, the more emails just float into your inbox.

3:25 And if for whatever reason you are away from work for even a day or two, you will know pretty quickly because your email inbox will fill up really, really quickly. So email can be overwhelming. And the challenge of email is that even though it doesn't necessarily constitute the bulk of the work you do, it's an important medium for communication. And there's a certain anxiety that can come from the feeling of the expectation that you know is present when people are waiting for you to respond to the email. And so email can be overwhelming in many ways. And I just want to acknowledge that. So why get to inbox your own? Well, one of the things about us as humans is we like completion.

4:08 We like to know that we got to the end. Now we never will get to the end of email, as long as we're alive. And even after we die, emails will still come into our inbox for a long while. So email is here to stay with us. And if you win the game today, you will surely not have won the game by the time you wake up tomorrow. And so the only way to keep winning the game all the time is to stay stuck to your inbox, answering every email as it comes. And you know that not much good can come out of that because you're not able to accomplish your work. Your writing, your research suffers, seeing patients suffers, everything suffers when you make inbox your primary priority. So how do you navigate the intricacies of your email while also being productive?

4:52 And that's kind of what we're here to talk about. Not necessarily to exalt inbox zero as king, though inbox zero is pretty amazing, but really to think about how do we manage email and still be productive as well. So the first thing I want to share is that you should find a system to manage your inbox. There are so many systems out there and I shared mine in an earlier episode. And I don't want to exalt one system over another because you know what? A system is a system is a system is a system. It's kind of like budgeting. Okay, people can, you know, say mint when there used to be a mint and mint is better than YNAB or, you know, no, doing it the old fashioned way with the envelopes makes more sense.

5:33 It doesn't matter. The real win is that there is a system. And so whatever system you have, don't judge another system. Don't think your system is not good. Just find a system you respect and a system that works for you because at the end, what is important is not the system you have, but that you actually are intentionally managing your email. That's what's key. And the way you win is by intention. And so whatever system you have, if it leads you to intentionally make decisions as far as how you manage your email, you are winning. So number one, find a system. Don't discriminate. Don't allow the systems and the numbers that are out there to overwhelm you.

6:17 Don't procrastinate. Just find one, choose it and move forward. All right. Number one, find a system. Number two, no matter the system you choose, what is important and consistent is that you set specific times for checking your email. And so you're going to want to turn off notifications. You're going to want to make sure that your email is not always calling your name. You don't always see the emails as you come in because I have to tell you, and I think this has been demonstrated in a number of publications, is that there is a dopamine hit or a dopamine surge that comes with responding to email because there's just a sense of completion. Some things happen, some things small.

7:00 You answered something right away. And so if you are not careful, you have your email inbox open and you see every email as it comes in and you're feeling so accomplished as you're responding to emails and you're not really getting anything done because email is not your primary priority. And so what's important is to set specific times for checking your email. And I want to say one person who really, really helped me a long time ago when I read their book is Cal Newport. So Cal Newport is a faculty member at an institution, I do not recall, but he's been very productive academically and he talks about the importance of deep work. So that's the book, Deep Work by Cal Newport and the problem with task switching and the residue that's left over when you're trying to switch from one task to the other and how important it is to be able to get yourself to the place of deep work before ever you go to something that's kind of like inflicting and not very deep like email.

8:00 And so set specific times to check your email inbox. And I have to tell you that it's helpful when your mind says, okay, I'm leaving all those emails alone, there's going to be specific time I'm going to address the email because it allows you to lay down the anxiety and the feeling of what am I missing, what am I missing? And sometimes the fact that we're in our inboxes all the time is because we have a fear of missing out. And so set very specific times to check your email and don't deviate from the schedule. That's number two. Number three says when you do deviate and I'm saying when because you're human and who doesn't love a dopamine surge every once in a while, especially when you're writing a grant that's very, very tasking or you're writing a paper that you are submitting for the fourth time.

8:47 I would love to win, right? And so email is a win. And so when you do deviate from your schedule, just forgive yourself and just say, oh, I did that again. Notice it. Don't judge it. Notice it. And you might ask yourself, well, how do I do things differently? Oh, maybe I should close the window that shows me when I get an email notification, right? What I'm saying is that the pull of email is so strong. It is so powerful. And that's why we all struggle. Most of us, you may not struggle, but I struggle. At least I struggle less now than I used to, but still struggling. And we're struggling because it's hard because email is such an easy quick fix because we can win easily an email because we can feel like we're productive.

9:35 Email, email wins. Email works. And so when you do deviate from your schedule of not checking your email all the time, or when you do accidentally on purpose forget to turn off email notification, or when you do check email seven, eight times an hour, just recognize that, oh, I did that again and just let it be. But forgive yourself, have compassion on yourself, and move on. And don't get overwhelmed. Don't judge yourself because it doesn't work very well. You tend to like come back with a vengeance of being really evil in your checking email. Don't judge yourself. Just acknowledge that, hey, I did it again and let it be.

10:18 Okay. Number four, set aside time to process emails. Now setting aside time to process emails is different from checking email. You know there's sometimes, I don't know if this is your experience, I'll look through my email inbox and say, oh, there is that email that I need to respond to for my division sheet, but I'm not ready to do that now. Great, I'm not ready because there's a certain kind of headspace I need to be in to be able to process certain emails. So kind of like you have your schedule and you already have a plan for when you do your writing for the day. And if you don't, you have to check my episodes about how to schedule your day for maximum productivity. And for whatever reason, I haven't done that episode, I will do that the next time.

11:02 I'm thinking about it and I'm like, I know I have talked about it, but probably not in that exact title, but now I need to and I will, absolutely. But as you schedule your day for maximum productivity, you schedule probably the top three things that move the needle forward for you, right? You hope you're doing that. And at some point you've got to schedule email in and it doesn't have to be every day. If you have five days in the week, maybe it's twice a week where you really schedule time to process emails. Now, when I get really busy, sometimes what I'll do is I'll just come in the inbox and I'll just look, is there any priority email in there that absolutely needs to be responded to right away? Also, the time the answer is no, but occasionally there's an email that I want to respond to sooner rather than later. And then I'll sit down and respond to that and I'll say the rest of you 75,000 emails, I'll address you later.

11:46 But then the time comes when I do process email, I set aside time to process emails. Now in setting aside time, I don't just set aside time and say, well, let's just see how long it takes. I have 30 minutes now to dedicate to email. Let's do it. And I have a system. I start from the bottom or sometimes I start from the top. You know, if I'm trying to avoid the email at the bottom, I start from the top. If I'm trying to avoid the email at the top, I start from the bottom. Yes, I am an avoidant when it comes to emails. And I finally get to the point where I'm like, I've processed and processed and I finally got back to this email that I've been evading and now I have to address it. Right? I do that quite a bit, but whatever. The key is not to judge ourselves, but it's to have a system.

12:28 So set aside time where you process emails, set aside very specific time and you might go over. So the goal is not to be like rigid and say, well, 30 minutes, I can only process email for 30 minutes. You might say, okay, well, let me finish this, these last two for the next five minutes. And then you do. And then you walk away from your email and you're processing, you're on your way to inbox zero. And I recognize that this episode is my inbox zero, but it puts zero is a, it's a goal that you reach for it. It may not be one that you reach all the time, but it's a goal you're working towards. And the time is coming, you'll be rewarded with inbox zero, but it cannot be your goal daily. But if you set aside specific periods of time to process email, and so that allows you to go through and delete all the stuff that's fluffy.

13:13 And I will tell you, I will share with you, I shared and the other episode I did about emails, it's that it's great to use these rules. You're like every email that comes from this mailbox should go first to deleted items, or you'll say every email that comes from this inbox should go to newsletter. So I have two folders. Actually, I think I have three, I have the inbox folder, which is standard. I'm an archive folder where everything goes that's been processed or addressed and I want to keep and no one's really keeping tabs on my inbox quota. So whatever everything goes to archive. And I have a newsletter folder and that's where my table of contents come in and my newsletters that I care about because I want the newsletters, but I want to go look for them in my own time.

13:56 I don't want them in my inbox because I get so many emails and it would just be nice to keep out the stuff that's absolutely not needed. So yeah, those are my three folders, the regular inbox folder, the archive folder, and then the newsletters folder. Everything else just gets archived and I'm so grateful for the search feature. I can always find anything I want whenever I want it. But it's processed, it's out of my email inbox. What does processing mean? What does processed mean? Processed means I've read the email and I've responded or I have put it on my calendar to do whatever is needed at that time. For example, let's say I get in my email inbox an invitation to review a journal and I've said yes against my better judgment, review a manager for a journal and I've said yes against my better judgment.

14:42 Then I schedule it. I say the review is due on the 18th. I need to schedule you for the 17th. Actually I schedule for the 17th and I invariably will push forward to the 18th and maybe might make the submission by the 19th. But you know, I just move to the deadline so I don't spend too much time on it and so the deadline forces me to actually move and do the work that's supposed to be done. So those things I put on my calendar and I actually will put on my calendar for a set time. So I'm like, this would take me 30 minutes to review this article. And so I put 30 minutes on the calendar and it's out of my inbox. Like I've put it on the calendar. It can now leave my inbox and I'll archive it. Okay. If for whatever reason I forgot the link, then I can search my computer and I can find it but it's out of my inbox because it's already been addressed.

15:28 If there's an email that I couldn't care less who it's from and I'm like, what are you doing in my inbox? I will make sure that I create a rule to keep it out of my inbox the next time and then I delete it and it's processed. And then I get these email notifications from my workplace. They want me to do this. You haven't completed this. And you know, I do want to get those because sometimes they come with, if you don't complete in the next five days, we will suspend your privileges. Yeah. Those are a little bit dramatic, but I want to get those when they come through. And so I won't necessarily put rules on those. I will let them sit in my inbox, but I will put them on the calendar. Like oh, compliance training is due on June 30th. Great. I'll put it on the calendar for June 29th so that I'm driven to do it at the right time.

16:10 Anyway, so that's what I mean by process. It's like addressing things. Either you've responded right away and usually I heard the rule of thumb and this is from, gosh, who's the Matt? Who was one of the big, big productivity gurus? I do not remember their name, but if I remember it, I'll put it in the show notes. They talk about if it takes less than two minutes, go ahead and just respond right away. If it's going to take more than two minutes, then schedule it for a different time. And I use the deadline usually to drive when I schedule. And it's up to you. Sometimes you want to respond to an email that takes more than two minutes and you're like, I'm processing email now. I want to do that. Great. And sometimes you're like, I want to do it later. And that's up to you. But definitely set aside time to process emails.

16:52 And when that time is done, wrap up and be done and just satisfy yourself. They're going to come back again and process it again, but just keep working towards inbox zero. Okay. So number five, I've kind of talked about in the act of processing emails, you do want to fill your calendar with things that do need to be done in your email inbox. For example, oh, your privileges are coming due and you need to complete these forms before your privileges expire. Great. When is the application due again? Great. It's due June the 30th. I'm going to put on my calendar for June the 28th. Whatever it is that works. But once it's on the calendar, then you're committed to it. I don't know about you, but if it's on the calendar, it's real. It's happening because it's on the calendar.

17:34 And so that's what I do. And I put things on my calendar so that it gets done. And it's a real meeting. It's not just on my calendar, just floating in space. Like it really is a meeting. And when I go to do my weekly planning meeting, identify the things on my calendar and I put them in my priority list to do that week because I've committed to them. But definitely fill your calendar with items for your inbox that need to be addressed in the future and then archive. When it's time, you can look for them if you need to. But sometimes what I'll do is I'll copy and paste the email into like a note and then I can search my notes when it's time so I won't get tempted to start messing around my inbox, which invariably I get distracted. Definitely fill your calendar with items that need to be addressed in the future, at a future date.

18:18 Okay. Number six is really important. Don't try to get to inbox zero every day. It's such a wonderful goal. And in reality, if you're getting to inbox zero every day, you're spending too much time in email. It takes time to get to inbox zero. It absolutely does. And you know, you get to inbox zero and then all of a sudden it's like, no, I got three more emails. I'm not an inbox zero. And that's why it's important to not try to make it a goal every day because, you know, invariably you're never going to get there. But in that, I mean, gosh, I don't want to be discouraging. You always need to get there. But when you get there, you recognize that someone's going to come and break your inbox zero and it's going to be okay. One of the things I do is to sometimes work towards inbox zero on Friday.

19:02 So I may not try to work towards it throughout the week. I'm kind of like, you know, triaging email throughout the week and I'm processing for like 30 minutes at a time. But towards Friday, I try to get to inbox zero on Fridays. Fridays are my administrative day. And one of the good things about processing to inbox zero on Friday is that I don't check my email Saturday or Sunday and I don't need to. I'm like, whoever sends me an email after hours on Friday, it's just, you know, they can't expect that I'm going to respond before hand and I don't respond. And I know there's a culture where people feel like you should be checking your inbox all the time. I do not subscribe to that culture. And if you do, I hope you will unsubscribe. But for me anyway, it feels good just to say I've processed.

19:45 I'm an inbox zero on Friday. Sign our email inbox. I don't even have to look at you till Monday afternoon because I'm not obligated to respond to emails at the beginning of the day. I don't tend to do that. So anyway, don't try to get inbox zero every day. Work towards a certain day of the week. And it may be Monday where you're like, great, I've allowed emails to pile up since Thursday last week. Let me now address them at the end of the day, Monday. It doesn't have to be Friday. For me, Friday is useful because I have more time than usual because it's an administrative day to process email on Fridays. And I love the idea of just shutting down for the weekend and saying, I'm done. I'm shut down complete and then I don't have to check anything at all till Monday because I know I've done well.

20:28 And so yes, don't try to get inbox zero every day. And just sometimes you get there and sometimes you don't, but just don't make it your goal, even though it's a great thing to be able to accomplish. All right. Number seven is that we do get to inbox zero. You should celebrate. You should totally celebrate. And I don't mean celebrate, like take yourself out to a party or have dinner, though, if that's what you want to do, that's great. But just celebrate like internally, like say, great, I did it and then close the inbox. Don't open it again. Don't check 10 minutes later to say, am I still an inbox zero? No. This is why if you're trying to work towards inbox zero, it's good to do it at the end of something, maybe at the end of the day, the end of the weekend or something like that, where it's like there was an end.

21:12 You can walk away and not come back until the beginning happens again. Right. But if you say I got into inbox zero and then 10 minutes later, you're like, well, let me just check my email. You will be disappointed. You won't be at inbox zero anymore. And then you'll be like, upset. So get to the end of inbox zero, get to the end of a thing, celebrate, do your inbox zero and then celebrate it and walk away from your email. Walk away. But there's a good feeling. It's a good feeling when you get to inbox zero, but you have to recognize that the work you do is bigger than responding to emails. And yes, email is a form of communication and so it's part of the work that we do. But it is important to move the needle forward on your own writing, on your own research before you even really start to process the inbox.

22:00 So please, I'm asking, I'm recommending that you don't ever process email until you've actually completed your work for the day. For me, that's a minimum of 30 minutes of writing, usually at least 90 minutes a day. Like I have done my work, I've completed this manuscript revision, I can now process email. And so I don't start email at the beginning of the day for that reason. Sometimes when I do, it's because I either schedule the email from the night before, I do that quite a bit, or I'll wake up early in the morning and do some writing and then I can do some email. So anyway, just celebrate and then walk away. All right, summarizing the seven things that I said about getting to inbox zero number one, find any system and use it.

22:45 Number two, set specific times for checking your email. Number three, when you do deviate from those specific times, forgive yourself, notice it and move on. Number four, set aside time to process emails, like really process them, getting them out of your inbox by archiving or putting them on the calendar. Number five, fill your calendar with items that need to be addressed in the future. Number six, don't try to get to inbox zero every day. And number seven, when you do get to inbox zero, celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. All right, are you overwhelmed by emails? Are you struggling? Are you challenged? Do you need help? I'd love to be your coach to coach you through how to work through your inbox. I'd love you to reach out to me by DM, especially on LinkedIn, but also on Facebook and Instagram and let me know how I can help you.

23:32 It's been a pleasure talking with you today. I look forward to seeing you again on the next episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do healthcare.