A useless guide on how to handle email

Dear your-name-here (possibly with some typos, but you know it is for you),

I hope this finds you well. I know this comes amidst a hundred emails wishing you the same for the same, but this one is different; this one will teach you how to get rid of about ninety-five of those.
First thing first: Following this guide, you may lose some... wait, sorry, where are my manners? Good day, or good evening if you are a desperate case.
Now, last thing second: I will break away from the tradition of placing the disclaimer at the bottom of the page in small font and will lay it right here, in normal-size font. I would even put it in red colour, or bold, but it would not look great on the website. It is only fair to warn you that by following this guide you may lose some opportunities to make millions from princes in countries far away or bank investors in countries nearby, and you might miss some important meetings and social events. The upside is that you will miss some important meetings and social events.

Are you ready to continue? Good, let us move on.
Firstly (or thirdly, if you keep track across paragraphs), you cannot get rid of all email. Well, you could, but some of it is rather good. It is useful to know when your chocolate-caramel-fudge-candy-filled-jumbo-donuts are shipping and if your bidding for the slimming shakes was accepted on eBay. It would also save you from refreshing the page every fifteen minutes on that German website for check for new clips if you subscribed to their newsletter. This is a compilation of best practices and recommendations from CEO's, entrepreneurs, journalists, celebrities, rich people (or their wives/husbands) who receive tons of email and still manage to be successful. Based on personal experience but without being successful or rich, I am going to explain how most of them are wrong and how the ones that are not wrong can be improved. You will get the best stuff in a single place: here. No ads*, no paywall or pop-ups with requests for donations. I do like donations, they are my favorite source of income along with alms and inheritance. But I would not ask for them.
Without further ado, straight into the topic. I am not the kind to digress in lengthy introductions with pompous statements and embellishments. Or to add unnecessary suspense to keep readers stuck to the screen for... right, where was I? I'll start, in no particular order.

6. Wake up early to read email. I was surprised to find out people would wake up unnaturally early just to get a head-start on email. This is a disaster: you still read email, and you also ruin your sleep. You not only damage your eyes and the important bit that sits behind them, but sleep is important. And I doubt people who do this will catch up later during the day power-napping at their desk. Utterly inefficient.

11. Look for long, important emails that would take less time to discuss in real-life. This is a mixed one. Personally, I would delete them first and wait for a come-back to see if they are important indeed. It is surprising to see how many turned out not to be after only a couple of weeks. Patience is a virtue. I do not have it, but I have the next best thing: laziness. If it turns out the topic was important, it is better to discuss it face to face, for several reasons. No, human interaction is not one of them. But you do not need to type long emails. And if your ideas were wrong, you may pretend later that you inferred something different all along. Verba volant, scripta manent. Pretentiousness aside, people have misunderstood the real value of this saying. Also, make sure there are no witnesses. Or that they will not be able to testify. How? Sorry, this is not a guide about abuse and intimidation. But I shall make a note of this.

3. If you want to receive less email, send less email. This little gem comes from a CEO, but I still agree. I write close to no email. And when I do, they are very short. Usually it is 'Tl;dr' or 'Unsubscribe'. If you are a CEO, I would imagine 'You are fired' or 'Excellent, you should work on this; you have until tomorrow evening to showcase a working demo' work just as well. I imagine the opposite may also work: if you have the patience, reply with long tedious emails. If you do not feel inspired, just find a long psalm related to the subject of office supplies or sales and distribution and make sure you attach an 18 MB corrupted PDF and reference to it. Particularly useful if you know they'll read on a mobile device.

8. Get one or more assistants to handle your email. If I could afford that, I do not see how this can be a problem in the first place; I would simply make the problem disappear by telling the captain to sail the yacht in an area where I can pretend to have no signal on my Vertu.

2. Ask people to indicate until when they need a reply. The irony is that this suggestion comes from a woman. Call me a misogynistic sow all you want, sisters, but women tend to be as bad at estimating time as men are at estimating the length of personal items. That aside, any deadline is irrelevant as a matter of principle (unless pizza delivery is involved). Should you miss a mark, you can always blame on some problems with your email account. "Yes, boss, again. I see it was supposed to be done on Thursday, but I just saw this 2 minutes ago, that is why I called. I really do not understand what those guys in IT are doing, but it is dreadful. That migration to cloud email only made things worse. Remember it also happened a few weeks ago before that meeting with Logistics?" If you are the proactive type, set an out-of-office-auto-reply with a return date after the deadline.

4. Never begin an email with "I". Apparently, this teaches you how to think through an issue. Could be, I have no idea. I usually begin with "You" and end with a drastic verb. Sometimes, when I want to give it a personal touch, I replace "You" with "Your mother" or "Your foster child".

24. Handle priority emails now and the rest later, at a less busy time. It sounds reasonable, but it is like setting up a scheduled task to delete emails later instead of deleting them right now. I still prefer to check in which warehouse my parcel of biscuits is at the moment. And then delete everything else.

8b. Forward the email to an appropriate person in the company, adding a question mark. I think this makes you look like a bit of a dictator. My personal take on this is to simply forward it to a random person that has nothing to do with that topic, without adding anything. Mysterious is better than bossy prick.

10. No emails one hour before bedtime; no emails early in the morning; no emails while spending time with family. Not much to add here. Except for: to make this better, sleep more often and wake up late. Oh, and it does not matter whose family it is.

31. Whenever you add someone in your address book, make a note on what you discussed with that person during the meeting so that you can get straight to the point. It sounds practical, but when I am writing an email I know exactly what I want to ask for. Otherwise I wouldn't be writing an email. If they want something, they can write the email. And I can delete it.

7. Whenever you become overwhelmed, declare Inbox bankruptcy, and start fresh. You might be tempted to think this sounds interesting, but you will sound like a whining hipster if you say it out loud. But do not stop there, please do go through the entire list of simple things you are incompetent at. Why not start fresh every morning? Silently, with just a quick hiss or two. Like an armpit deodorant. Yeah! Two can play the game of spouting stupid things that sound interesting.

9. Answer quickly, straight away, to any email. Interesting, but it can get tiresome. Especially with order confirmations and newsletters from noreply@some.mail. If you are serious about being quick, use automatic replies.

22. Never reply when you are emotional. I am very emotional behind my cold-blooded appearance, this goes straight up my alley. When asked why the weekly report was late two months I remind people that I have felt very emotional this winter and I could not handle any email. Do not use this excuse in August. Adapt. The season needn't be set in stone.

19. Do not allow emails between employees. Before you pop the champagne, it continues with encouraging people to meet and (gasp!) talk to their colleagues. As I am sipping from the cup of flat disappointment, I am pondering if that CEO thought how many of their staff will start sending sensitive information and confidential attachments through Yahoo or Hotmail. The silver-line for me is that NSFW replies from those addresses can be attacked in a lawsuit as grounds for dismissal.

37. Block access to emails after working hours and during weekends. It makes people feel less stressed and more in control of their personal life. I found out recently this has been long implemented at my workplace, too, but I have no idea when. I only check my emails between 10:45 and 14:50 on Tuesday and Friday anyway.

108. Fake business-cards. I could not agree more with this one. Partly because this is my idea. An accidental typo when you order your business cards can reduce the amount of email by 41%.

109. Automatic replies and rules. If there is one thing to remember from this guide, is to configure the auto-reply and automatic rules. One is proactive, one is reactive. And both immensely practical. If you feel intimidated by how many options there are when configuring rules, focus on those for that say Mark as read and Delete. The other thing to remember is that donations are welcome (in case you forgot, which I bet you did).


Do you have some ideas of your own for handling email? Feel free to email them to me. They are in safe hands.



*Disclaimer: Please disregard this part if I decided to put ads in the website later. If I do, it is only to still have a disclaimer at the end, despite saying earlier that I would not. And nothing else. Oh, and money. 
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