How to quit treating your email inbox as a ‘to do’ list

Plus some reflections on how Academia Made Easier has evolved over time

Hello and welcome to Academia Made Easier. I am so glad that you are here.  

When I announced my plans to launch this newsletter in January 2021, I described it as a “twice-a-month newsletter” with “easy tips for teaching, productivity, and work-life balance in academia”. I see now that twice a month was a bit aspirational: while in many months I hit or even surpassed this mark, in other months I felt lucky to get one newsletter out the door. But when I look at the totals, I see that I have done better than I realized: in the 42 months since my first newsletter in February 2021 until today, I have created an archive of 83 newsletters (including this one) – just one shy of my goal.  🎉 🎉 🎉

Scanning the Academia Made Easier archive, it is clear that I haven’t focused much on teaching. I explore teaching topics in my monthly University Affairs column, “The Skills Agenda”, and have discovered that I don’t have much more to say each month. Also, as I am currently in a decanal role, my teaching responsibilities are low, making teaching is less top-of-mind when I sit down to write. 

Balance and productivity, on the other hand, continue to occupy my thinking and this newsletter. My opinions and strategies for both continue to evolve.  While I originally envisaged Academia Made Easier as a space to share my ideas, it has also served as a space to process and challenge my thoughts. In doing so, I have grown increasingly weary of how most productivity advice ignores societal privilege. (I recently ranted talked about this with Heather Ross on her Better Me podcast.) 

In this newsletter, I strive to be mindful of how social norms and power dynamics structure our agency. At the same time, I encourage people to recognize and seize their agency, however large or small. What has become apparent to me as I consider issues of agency is the importance of mindset to both balance and productivity. Our mindset informs our actions and can be a powerful tool for change.

Today, I am jumping into the mindset theme by considering everyone’s work albatros: email. Email – along with text, Teams, Slack, and WhatsApp messages – occupies far too much mental and calendar space for many of us. Often, it can feel like others are dictating our priorities through their constant emailed requests and inquiries. This feeling erodes our sense of control over our work lives. It is exhausting.

I believe that it is possible to adopt an email mindset that supports both your productivity and your work-life balance. If you feel your email and other work communications are running your life, today’s small thing to try immediately is for you.   

One Small Thing to Try Immediately: Reset your email mindset

Establishing a new mindset – be it about email or anything else – requires deliberate attention to your thoughts. You must actively decide how you want to think about something. Once you have identified your desired new mindset, you must determine your implementation strategies. Because your old mindset is deeply ingrained and the actions supporting it are habitual, you need a plan to make the new mindset your new default.

Here is how you can do this concerning email.

1. Recognize that not all emails require an immediate response – or even any response at all. Repeat after me: Not all emails require a response. Not all emails require a response. 

Some readers may think, “Of course not all emails require a response.” Others, however, will be more uncomfortable with the idea of leaving emails answered at a later date – or never. For those of us (read: women, individuals from underrepresented groups) who have had a lifetime of socialization to be ‘nice’ at all times (even if it is inconvenient to us) and to all people (even random strangers emailing to ask us to give up our time to advance their interests), this idea is less comfortable. 

So, repeat after me: Not all emails require a response. 

2. Define which types of emails require immediate responses for your role and context. Repeat after me, part 2: Very few emails require an immediate response. 

The ‘inbox zero’ idea creates the false impression that all emails should be dealt with by the end of the day, but email turnaround time can be quite variable. Use this variability to your advantage. Think of email as falling into three categories: emails requiring no response, emails that can have a delayed response, and emails requiring an immediate response. Then, considering your specific responsibilities and context, decide what goes into each category (you can use the table below!). From this, decide what action you will take for each category.

3. Pre-commit to your email practices and communicate them as appropriate. Email won’t contain itself, so you need to commit to the size of your daily ‘email container’. (See my past newsletter “How to contain work to the realities of your limited work time” for more about the idea of work containers.) Consider your current role and responsibilities and determine the least amount of daily email you could get away with. Thirty minutes a day? One hour?

Once you have estimated the total amount of time, decide how you want to allocate this time. Do you want to be continually responding to email throughout the day, with five minutes here and ten minutes there? Do you want to batch email to respond to at times that are most appropriate to you? My own preference is to batch email. Doing so allows me to maintain focus during other points in the day and gives time for emotionally charged emails (ugh!) to defuse. I regularly schedule email time into my calendar and then use the scheduled time to process as many emails as possible. Any emails I don’t get to during that time are left until my next email processing time, as I have already determined they can wait.

After you have clearly decided for yourself what your email practices will be, communicate these practices to others. This will both allow others to set appropriate expectations (e.g., “Loleen doesn’t respond to emails over the weekend, so I won’t expect a response until early next week”) and pre-commits you to maintaining your own email practices to avoid being someone who fails to do what they say they will do. Some options for letting others know about your email practices, with sample language for you to adopt/adapt this as you see fit:

• Email signature: For many years, I have used the following email signature: “Note: I typically reply to email between 7-8 am and 5-6 pm CST, Monday-Friday, within three working days. Out of respect for your work-life balance and my own, I avoid sending or responding to non-urgent emails before 7 am and after 6 pm CST Monday-Friday and on weekends.” 

• Class announcement: “Dear students: To streamline class communications, I respond to student emails Monday-Friday between 4 and 5 pm. I typically do not respond to student emails outside this time period. To ensure an efficient response, please email me before 4 pm weekdays. I am also happy to speak with you immediately after class and during my weekly office hours (Tuesdays and Thursdays 1-2 pm in ENG209).”

• In-person: “Hey Don - just wanted to let you know that I will be responding to non-urgent emails at the end of the day moving forward. Just wanted to give you a head’s up.”

4. Manage your emotions around email. Many people I have spoken with tell me they feel guilty or anxious about their unanswered emails and overflowing inboxes. These strong emotional responses reflect internalized burnout culture. Anticipate that resetting your email mindset and practices will invoke some emotions and plan for how you will manage these. Self-talk (“I have booked an email time at 4 pm and the emails can wait”), distraction (cat videos!), and chocolate might be part of your toolkit. 

Over time, the new email mindset and practices will become more familiar and then second nature. Stick with it, and let me know how things work go. I always love to hear from you!

Want more ideas about managing email? Be sure to check out my previous newsletters “How to quit sending non-urgent email during non-work hours”, “How to reduce the number of emails in your inbox”, “How to use strategic procrastination to spend less time on email and other low leverage tasks”, and “How to answer the same question again and again more quickly”.

Until next time…

While it has been over a month since my last Academia Made Easier newsletter, I have been writing other things! If you are interested, I invite you to see my Reimagining Graduate Education newsletter “Are EDI and decolonization training necessary for Arts graduate education?” and my Skills Agenda column (with Erin Aspenlieder) “How faculty can use Generative AI in their teaching”. And, as always, I invite you to share Academia Made Easier with your networks. Your assistance in growing the Academia Made Easier audience is greatly appreciated.

Stay well, my colleagues. 

P.S. In reflecting on my past newsletters, I think my favourites are “How to quit lying to yourself about how long things will take” and “How to pace yourself over the few months”, mainly because I had a lot of fun writing them. Do you have any favourite Academia Made Easier newsletters? I would love to hear what they are in the comments!

If you find Academia Made Easier useful, please support my chocolate habit through my Buy me a coffee page. This site allows readers to show their appreciation for the unpaid labour of writers like me. 🍫🧁🙏

If you like the look of classically styled women’s clothing and the feel and functionality of athleisure, I strongly recommend SophieGrace, a Canadian company. Be sure to use my discount code AcademiaMadeEasier to get 20% off. 

Have you got your copy of my new book, For the Public Good: Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities? If not, please order it now (and/or ask your university library to get a copy), be sure to sign up for the related Substack “Reimagining Graduate Education”, and note that my coauthors and I welcome invitations to work with units to implement the book’s ideas! Reviewer feedback of note:  

• “It is the kind of quietly good book we need to see more of. … This book provides a very solid description of the process of defining and developing excellent, sustainable arts programs that serve students rather than academics. And not only is it dead-on in terms of its recommendations about how to design and evaluate programs, it has a lot of helpful matrices and worksheets to help those who are put in positions requiring them to do exactly that … More like this, please." - Alex Usher

• “Nearly half the book is dedicated to charting a transformative course for liberal arts departments.... If For the Public Good can provide the impetus for social sciences and humanities departments to refine their graduate studies programs, the career outcomes for tens of thousands of grad students will be the better for it. That alone would move the needle on Canada’s public good problem." - Literary Review of Canada