Step 1 - Emergencies Only
You should look at your Inbox once - briefly - before lessons start each day. You are only looking for urgent messages, and you should be able to do this by looking at the subject lines only – there is no need to open any e-mails. This simple discipline is actually quite difficult if you are used to diving into your e-mails first thing each day. You need to be ruthless: at the start of the day, you will only deal with an e-mail if it genuinely urgent (that means that it cannot wait even a few hours). You will be emptying your Inbox each day, so it should be unusual for there to be more than ten e-mails there at the beginning of the day. This brief morning routine should therefore take no longer than a minute.
Step 2 - Main Processing
Later in the day, at a suitable time – ideally the same time each day – you should process your e-mails, using the routine shown below. This routine is solely aimed at processing the e-mails. Any tasks that are requested or described in the e-mails (reports, statistics, letters, whatever) should be dealt with separately, and prioritised alongside other commitments. This means that dealing with e-mails is a routine, mundane process, which requires very little thinking, and certainly no stress. You do not need to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. With practice, you should be able to do this during a fifteen minute break, while drinking coffee and chatting.
How to Process E-Mails
The trick is to clear your Inbox completely each day. Even the most e-mail obsessed schools rarely generate more than thirty e-mails a day for a classroom teacher, so you will invariably start with a manageable set of messages.
Ideally, first sort your e-mails into reverse chronological order, so it is easy to deal with the oldest messages first. Most e-mail programs let you do this with a single click.
Glance at the clock. Jot down the time and how many e-mails you have received.
For each message in your Inbox, you should do the following
1. Skip-read it
2a. Delete the message immediately if you don’t need it at all, or
2b. If the message can be dealt with in less than 30 seconds, do so; then delete the message or drop it into Old Stuff, or
2c. If the message requires an action or a reply which will take more than 30 seconds, drop the message in your Hot Stuff folder and jot down a task on your Ticklist, or
2d. if the message requires no action, but contains information that you are likely to need, drop it into Hot Stuff (if you're likely to need it within a week) or Old Stuff (otherwise)
It is important that you make a decision about each message as soon as you read it. There are no exceptions and you need to be ruthless, and apply the 30-second rule rigorously. You should never touch a message in your inbox more than once.
When you have finished, jot down the time again. You should be aiming to process 20 e-mails in less than ten minutes - remember that any time-consuming e-mails should be dealt with in five seconds flat: just drop them in the Hot Stuff folder and jot down a task in your Ticklist.
You should not look at your Inbox again until the following day. However, the most difficult part of this procedure is something which is not a part of your daily routine. When you doing your Ticks-and-Twos, and Tens, you will almost certainly need to use your Hot Stuff folder. This means that you will have your e-mail program open. You must remember that e-mail is not a tool for instant messaging. If a message alert pops up - you have mail - you must have the discipline to ignore it and concentrate on the task you are doing on the Hot Stuff folder.
Every week, you should look at your Hot Stuff folder. Skip-read each subject line. If the message no longer requires any action, or is no longer hot news, drop it in the Old Stuff folder. Hopefully, there will be no surprises in your Hot Stuff, but if there is anything you have forgotten, add it to your Ticklist.
It is important that you don't use your Hot Stuff folder to determine your workload. That is what your Ticklist is for and you want to work with as few sources as you possibly can. You need to prioritise any tasks which are e-mailed to you alongside all of your other tasks and commitments. Of course, you will also find that a lot of your Ticklist, will relate to your Sent mail, not just the messages which arrive in your Inbox.