Here's the good news, which applies to all teachers:
you can reduce the amount of time you spend on e-mails to less than ten minutes a day;
you can choose when you're going to deal with e-mails, picking a time which suits your daily routine.
you can empty your inbox every single day and go to bed knowing that you are up-to-date and in control;
you can develop a reputation as a reliable, efficient part of the teaching team. You can grow used to hearing people say “Thank you for getting back to me so quickly”.
In order to effect this radical change, you will need to do three things:
think about when you work best
make some small adjustments to your daily routine;
practice your new good habits every single day.
If you are a head of department or hold another position of responsibility in your school, you can develop your skill with e-mail much further: getting the results you want using shorter messages, exchanging information more quickly, and making your department a more relaxed environment to work in.
First, though, you need to understand about separating routine work from important work. This is a key theme in TM4T:
Separating Tasks
When teachers talk about the amount of work involved in e-mails, they often confuse the contents of the e-mail (for example the action points from yesterday's meeting), with the e-mail itself. In fact, there are three types of task involved in this simple example:
first of all processing the e-mail
secondly reading the action-points from the meeting and assessing which of them apply to you,
thirdly carrying out the action points themselves.
It is really important to separate the first two types of task (processing the e-mail and reading the minutes) from the last type (the action points themselves). The e-mail and the reading are unskilled, routine tasks, which can be batched up and done without much mental effort . The action points of the meeting, on the other hand, may need to be tackled in an entirely different way. If they involve the educational future of your students, they will need your teacherly skills, experience, and attention: a different mindset (if you haven't read about mindsets already, read here).
Any real work that pops up in an e-mail requires a decision - if it can be done quickly do it straight away, following the TM4T rules. Otherwise, do it later, at a time of your own choosing.
Obviously, there is no simple way to remove a lot of the work involved in teaching. We can process our e-mails in ten minutes, but the tasks described or information requested in those e-mails may take hours. The important thing is that this work - whatever it is - must be planned by you, prioritised in line with your other commitments and done at a time chosen by you. This step of separating the communication from the task is psychologically important in taking control of your life.
Next, let's look at an example of how an efficient teacher tackles e-mail. There is a lot of detail in this case-study; it is there for a reason: to make it absolutely clear what is meant in practice by the TM4T principles explained elsewhere in this website. To read about Mary's e-mail, click here.
Reading about Mary, she clearly had her e-mail software set up a particular way in order to work efficiently. To read about how to set up your system, click here.
Mary also clearly had a set daily routine. To read about an efficient daily routine, click here.