Came across this BuzzFeed News article by Katie Notopoulos and it really resonated with me. The gist is to essentially treat email more like text messages. Respond quickly and succinctly whenever possible.
The way she described her previous approach to email really resonated with me:
What trips me up most is my habit of scanning my inbox, often on my phone, opening an email, reading it, and thinking, “I’ll reply to that later when I’m at my computer and/or not in the middle of this other project and can give a full reply.” Then I leave it marked as “read” and forget about it. I check my inbox constantly, but I only actually deal with my emails in a deliberate way during a few dedicated chunks of my day.
This is almost exactly the way I've long dealt with email, and the unread count continues to pile up. I try to adopt Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero method as much as possible by turning emails into tasks and actions, or by utilizing the "snooze until later" offerred by many email apps these days, including Gmail, but I still have too many emails that sit as unread because I haven't responded to them. Katie describes that here:
My problem is I still let emails slip through the cracks unanswered, occasionally causing problems. I recently searched my sent emails for the term “sorry” and found more than I wish to admit in which I said some version of “sorry for the late reply.”
Bingo. Enter Katie's proposed solution of emailing like a CEO:
Let’s call this “boss email.” It’s defined by nearly immediate — but short and terse — replies. The classic two-word email. For underlings, it can be inscrutable. Is that an angry “thanks” or a grateful “thanks”? Does “please update me” imply impatience with you? Boss email can be the workplace equivalent of getting a “k” text reply from a Tinder date.
She talks about more examples of what this looks like in her article, but the result after taking this approach for a week is profound:
For that whole week, I felt extremely productive at work. And I was! I ended up publishing more articles than usual. There was an extra, unexpected effect — I felt less like I needed to check my email in the evening after work. Previously, at night I’d often catch up on email, especially personal emails that I had put off during the workday. No more! At night I was able to relax and watch Stranger Things without being glued to my phone. I even started going to the gym more regularly! I am literally not joking when I say that I think it made me a better person!
If you struggle with keeping up with email like I do, I encourage you to give Katie's article a read. The approach may not be appropriate for all email responses, but it's likely more appropriate than you realize to many of those unread emails you have been meaning to respond to but haven't. Afer all, a concise but timely response is better than no response at all, right?