Stress is omnipresent. It lurks in every area of our lives. Family members add stress from time to time (okay, maybe more often than that). Friends can be a pain, or distant, or unreliable. Our kids wake up unexpectedly (or perhaps expectedly) at 2:00am. We want better grades or more money or that promotion we feel we deserve. Our kitchens need remodeling. The toilet is clogged. The bills are piling up. Taxes are due. We need to exercise more. We take ourselves too seriously. Traffic is bad. Our plane is delayed. The weather stinks. And, because of all this, we worry and then react poorly. Trust me, I get it. Life is stressful.
If that’s true, you ask, why in the world is this post about returning email for crying out loud! Patience grasshopper. After speaking about stress to audiences for over a decade, I have discovered that it’s best for us to start slowly with any stress-reduction plan. This slow roll makes it more palatable and increases the odds of you actually doing something about your stress level. Biting off too much just adds unnecessary stress. And, though diving into stress-reduction in depth requires a longer post for another day, here is a short thesis statement of my approach.
There are certain things that we should stress over – major stressors, let’s call them. These are things like broken family relationships, a drug or alcohol problem, the inability to stop cheating in romantic relationships or at school, major unhappiness at work or in a career field, and other big life problems. These issues are major stressors and appropriately so. There is little I can do to help you here. Instead, you must dedicate the time and energy it takes to fight your way back into the light. To eliminate this type of stress, you need to literally change your life.
The best way to accomplish life change is to first eliminate or significantly reduce our minor stressors. Minor stressors are things the that trouble us but really shouldn’t. In this category lies: perfectionism, impatience, failure to apologize when merely saying “I’m sorry,” could halt a fight. You know, the little-ish stuff that we could fix by just swallowing a little bit of pride, reacting differently, and accepting that we are humans who mess up and are never perfect. Remedying minor stressors is a prime area where we can saw major points off our stress score.
Today, let’s focus on one minor stressor that is easy to reduce, or even remove, from your life – clogged inboxes. Let’s talk about the email and other messages that clutter our inboxes, then our brains, and, finally, our lives. To get started, here’s my advice: You need to return your emails – all of them – each day.
Me Too! So, I Made This A New Year’s Resolution
I receive a lot of email. It’s comes with the territory of my job, I guess. Some messages are from students checking in with me or wondering about a legal / ethical issue from lecture. These are generally a pleasure to read and respond to. Others are messages about potential speaking gigs at colleges or businesses. These are also fun messages to read.
But then . . . I encounter the rest of my inbox. I get messages asking (mostly telling) me to serve on a committee that meets weekly (gag!) or turn in a student assessment report for accreditation. My law license needs to be renewed. Someone needs me to complete a form or approve a budget request. There is a new HR training to attend next Friday afternoon and a calendar meeting request. In comes a message from some administrator mad at me for failing to follow the new common syllabus template (seriously!) policy – again. Then comes the daily dose of spam asking me to send money to Nigeria, open malware, or type in my password to “verify” my 401(k). And finally, there are the people who find it critical to cc me and thirty others on an email chain where two camps bicker about a minor policy change. Ugh!
As much as I dislike receiving the vast majority of these messages, I just cannot will them away. I wish I could use The Force or some other magic incantation to mind trick people into skipping over me and messaging someone else to do this stuff. In the end, I was tired of waking up to fifty new emails each morning. So, I pondered my options.
- Option #1: I thought about declaring Email Bankruptcy. Wouldn’t that be great! Just hit, “Select All,” “Delete.” It didn’t take long to determine that I am too old and too far into my career for that to fly. I should add that it often feels as if my students take the bankruptcy approach when I never receive a reply to my email. Regardless, email bankruptcy is a no-go for me.
- Option #2: Return my email in a timely manner like a responsible adult. This is obviously the best of the two options. So, I decided to do something about my cluttered inboxes – return all my emails, for once.
I made a resolution on January 1, 2017 to deal with each message every night before bedtime . . . for an entire year! The deal was that I would not do this right before bed because then I would worry about my new committee assignment or the silly common syllabus policy all night. Instead, I vowed to spend some time after dinner going through stuff and responding, opening the attachments, filling out the forms, etc. It would hurt, to be sure. But, it would be better than catching up for four hours every Saturday like I’d been doing.
Let me be clear: the start of this process sucks. I mean, really sucks. I had hundreds of emails just sitting in there on New Year’s Day. Realistically, I was only able to delete thirty or so as being spam, or old, or irrelevant. But, I still had to read them to make certain. The other hundred or so required me to take action before hitting delete or archive. It was hard, but I got my inbox down to zero by around January 5. That was actually a cathartic moment for me. A silly one – there was no crying or outward screaming. But, it was quite a relief nonetheless.
And, for just over a year, I’ve done my best to whittle all my emails away every day. It doesn’t always happen perfectly. Sometimes there is stuff in there that will take me hours to do. These are hours that I just don’t have each day. Or, I just don’t want to do that work today. That’s okay too. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is an acceptable tweak to my policy as long as I process the rest of my messages each day. Who really cares if I have two emails to deal with tomorrow.
Quick note on my policy tweak: the two messages I leave today will be joined by forty more tomorrow. So, be careful of the “I’ll just leave these two emails until tomorrow” approach. It’s necessary sometime, but it should be somewhat rare.
After I got my email under control, I decided to attack my text messages and social media stuff just hanging out there. My typical response went like this, “I’m sorry, old friend from high school, that I ignored your nice birthday message from last March (it’s now June). I was in a bad inbox place in my life. Anyway, how are you? How’s your family?” I did that for a week and was able to catch up there too. And, it was great to reconnect. Not one person made a big deal out of it; in fact, they admitted to being in the same boat too.
Today, I am meeting my goal. And, I must say that my stress level has gone down. The few points that my cluttered inbox added to my stress score have evaporated. I now have the bandwidth to deal with my major, pressing stressors.
Now it’s your turn. Try to clean out your inbox every day for a month and let me know how it goes. Assuming Email Bankruptcy is also not an option for you, this is the best way to move forward. You will feel so much better – like you’ve accomplished something important. And you have.
In this venture I wish you . . . the best of success!
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- Check out Corey’s other cool ethics blog posts on LEADERSHIP and HAPPINESS – you won’t regret it.
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