After writing yesterday’s post on email detox, I decided to look though my digital files for articles on email and see what else I could glean from them. Here are some of the results:

How This MailChimp Employee Limits His Email Time To 90 Minutes A Day.

Processes emails in two windows each day. 60 mins each morning and then 30 minutes at the end of each work day.

The 60 minutes is used to process less important and less urgent messages. The 30 minute window deals with top priority items that require more thought.

Does not use multiple folders for different subjects but has three basic folders:

• His Inbox: Marks most important messages as unread so that they stay in front of him
• A “To-Do” folder: Items that I need to take action on or get responses on (just not necessarily right away)
• A “To-Read” folder: He also has filters that automatically direct newsletters into the “To Read” folder.

Everything else is archived. He rarely deletes anything

Does keep his email open through the day to see  subject lines but is not usually replying until his two windows.

He marks important emails in his Inbox as unread so that they stay in his view (and processes these in his 30 minute session).

How to Write Email with Military Precision

“By adopting military email etiquette, you will introduce a kernel of clarity to your correspondence and that of your colleagues and clients.”

1. Subjects with keywords. The first thing that your email recipient sees is your name and subject line, so it’s critical that the subject clearly states the purpose of the email, and specifically, what you want them to do with your note. Military personnel use keywords that characterize the nature of the email in the subject. Some of these keywords include:

• ACTION – Compulsory for the recipient to take some action
• SIGN – Requires the signature of the recipient
• INFO – For informational purposes only, and there is no response or action required
• DECISION – Requires a decision by the recipient
• REQUEST – Seeks permission or approval by the recipient
• COORD – Coordination by or with the recipient is needed

These demarcations might seem obvious or needlessly exclamatory because they are capitalized. But your emails will undoubtedly stand out in your recipient’s inbox, and they won’t have to work out the purpose of your emails. (It also forces you to think about what you really want from someone before you contribute to their inbox clutter.)

2. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). 

Military professionals lead their emails with a short, staccato statement known as the BLUF. (Yes, being the military, there is an acronym for everything.) It declares the purpose of the email and action required. The BLUF should quickly answer the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why.

3. Be economical. 

Military personnel know that short emails are more effective than long ones, so they try to fit all content in one pane, so the recipient doesn’t have to scroll.

Could you go a week without checking work email?

Time Management Ninja describes what he did to avoid checking email on vacation.

• Set Expectations – Simply setting expectations in your absence is a powerful method of preventing many communication issues. Make sure people know you are out of the loop. When I am on vacation, I ensure that my out-of-office notification clearly states that I will be away and who to contact in my absence.
• Trust Your Team – Too many leaders want to “be in on every decision.” You need to trust your team to make decisions and act in your absence. No one person should be indispensable to operations. And if they are,  you aren’t empowering your people.
• Reachable for Emergencies – Maybe not for the general population, but my boss and my direct reporting manager could reach me via text or Slack.

A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email

I love this idea

Employees no longer have personalized email addresses. Instead, each individual posts a schedule of two or three stretches of time during the day when he or she will be available for communication. During these office hours, the individual guarantees to be reachable in person, by phone, and by instant messenger technologies like Slack. Outside of someone’s stated office hours, however, you cannot command their attention. If you need them, you have to keep track of what you need until they’re next available.

On the flipside, when you’re between your own scheduled office hours, you have no inboxes to check or messages demanding response. You’re left, in other words, to simply work. And of course, when you’re home in the evening or on vacation, the fact that there’s no inbox slowly filling up with urgent obligations allows a degree of rest and recharge that’s all but lost from the lives of most knowledge workers today.

6 Steps to Tame Your Email Overload

1. Unsubscribe

Unsubscribe from newsletters, promotional email messages, and other non-essential email messages using something like SpamDrain. Other services like Unroll.me round up your promotional email messages and newsletters and let you unsubscribe in a single click. Those you want to keep are organized into a single email delivery each day.

To cut down on future junk email messages, establish an email address to use for subscriptions and online purchases.

2. Scan and sort

Scan your emails and sort them into folders that will allow you to process the same kinds of emails together which is far more efficient than jumping from one subject to another or one level of intensity to another.

21 Do’s and Don’ts To Improve Your Email Communications

#4 Write your Emails Backwards – To improve responses to your emails, lead with the question or call-to-action as the first line in your email.

#7 Don’t Play Email Ping-Pong – Avoid the back-and-forth email conversation. If you have to reply more than twice, you should probably pick up the phone and call the individual. Email is not a good medium for conversations.

How To Get Things Done: Taming the Email Beast

Open your inbox and begin with the very first email. Open it up and immediately decide what you will do with it. You have a few options:

• Trash it. If it is junk or something that is irrelevant to you, erase it.
• Archive it. If it is something you may need in the future, but that requires no action on your part, archive it.
• Reply to it. If you can reply to it in no more than ten or fifteen seconds and with little mental exertion, do that right away.
• Move it to your Reply folder. If you cannot reply to it in just a few seconds or if it will require some thought, move it to your reply folder.

Now move to the next email in your inbox, and then the one after that, and the one after that. Do not skip emails and do not allow yourself to do nothing with your emails. By the time you are finished, you should have 0 emails in your inbox.

Only Check Email Twice a Day

My plan is check in at the beginning and end of the work day and spend that time to read and respond to emails for a concentrated 30 minutes. The rest of the day, my inbox will be closed and I’ll set an auto response to let people know that they’ll have to wait a little while longer for a response.

5 Ways to Keep Email From Taking Over Your Life

TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS! “If you’re interrupted, even if you handle it in one minute, it takes another four minutes to get back to what you were doing before,” she explains. “It’s death by a thousand paper cuts. If you can reduce 15 interruptions a day, you’ll find yourself with at least an hour more of productivity. If you do this for a week, that’s five more hours of uninterrupted working time.”

LIMIT CHECK-INS! For maximum productivity, she suggests, limit your checks to just three times a day: first thing in the morning, after lunch, and near the end of the day. If that seems completely unreasonable, add in a mid-morning and mid-afternoon email fix. “Anything but the direst emergency—which shouldn’t be conveyed in email anyway—can wait 90 minutes or more,”

DON’T CHECK IF YOU WON’T REPLY: If you can’t give your email the appropriate attention, don’t bother checking it. “Check your email only when you have time to respond, not just react,” Egan advises. “Why would you check your email five minutes before you go to sleep? If someone sends a scathing note, you’ll stew about it all night, and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it.

Blogs

No More Channel-Flipping Sermons. | Scribblepreach.com
I’m with Nick on this one:

So pick a section of scripture, and stick to it. Put down the clicker. Maybe change the channel once, from Old Testament to New, or vice versa. But hunker down. Tell the story, make the argument, sing the song. If I had to make a rule of thumb, I’d say three different texts is plenty, but two is ideal.

Does Sermon Prep Get Easier? | Richard Caldwell, The Expositors Seminary
“Can I expect that the longer I preach, and the more times that I prepare sermons, the easier it will become to be ready by Sunday? I would answer, yes and no.”

3 Ways to Recognize Workaholism in Ministry | Eric Geiger
“Ministry can attract workaholics because working non-stop in ministry can feel holy and attract applause. But being a workaholic in any role is never holy, and it always leaves one hollow. Families suffer. Relationships are harmed. No one wins.”

Six Questions to Diagnose Subtle Gossip | Desiring God
Ever sent a message about someone to others and then realize you’ve also sent it to the person too? Yep.

Best Possible Gift: The Legacy of Mike Ovey (1958–2017)| Matthew Barrett, TGC
“Sadly, and without warning, Mike died this past Saturday evening, leaving behind his wife, Heather, and their three children: Charlie, Harry, and Ana. It is an understatement to say Mike’s death was an absolute shock to the close-knit seminary community at Oak Hill as well as to the wider evangelical world. Countless stude nts, colleagues, and friends continue to grieve such a great loss to the church in the UK and in America. To many the timing seems premature. Why Mike Ovey . . . and why now, O Lord?”

Isabel Hardman: When my mind stopped working, I realised just how badly we treat mental health| The Telegraph 
“At first, I found work was an escape from my personal problems, and colleagues remarked on how well I seemed to be coping, given what had happened. But gradually I found my mind becoming foggier, and my reactions to everyday troubles more extreme and anxious. I’ve had times in my life where I have been miserable. But never before had I struggled to control my mind.”

What Christianity Alone Offers Transgender Persons | Sam Allberry, TGC
“A day barely passes without transgender issues hitting the news. It might be a human interest feature about someone transitioning from one sex to another, and how they’ve been received (or not) by their communities. It might concern the politics of rights for transgender men and women, and which restrooms should be available to them. It might have to do with complex discussions about the causes of and treatments available for transgenderism. But one thing’s for sure: This issue isn’t going away anytime soon, and we Christians can’t afford to avoid it. ”

Featured Book

For your non-Kindle book buying needs please consider using Reformation Heritage Books in the USA and Reformed Book Services in Canada. Good value prices and shipping.

Living the Christian Life: Selected Thoughts of William Grimshaw of Haworth

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Perspectives Series on sale, $2.99-$9.99

Your New Money Mindset: Create a Healthy Relationship with Money by Brad Hewitt and James Moline ($3.99)

Grief Undone: A Journey with God and Cancer by Elizabeth W. D. Groves ($2.99)

Boring: Finding an Extraordinary God in an Ordinary Life by Michael Kelley ($0.99)

Following on from yesterday’s post which highlighted the email deluge that’s drowning so many of us, here are the steps I take to hold back the flood. I’d love to hear what you do in the comments below.

1. I check email three times a day

I do a quick check as soon as I get to my desk at 7:15 am. This is mainly to make sure there aren’t any urgent family messages from the UK overnight. I very rarely reply to any emails on this check, unless there is an emergency.

My second check is 12 noon. Again, I very rarely reply to anything on this check unless it’s something urgent from a colleague or in my congregation.

My third check is about 3 pm when I process all my email in one batch until (ideally) I have nothing in my inbox.

2. I set a time limit of about 45 minutes to process email

This deadline forces me to minimize the time on each email and squeeze in as many as I can within the time. I keep them as brief and to the point as possible. If there’s an email that’s going to take more time than usual, I will usually put it in a folder marked Friday. If there are emails I haven’t got to in that time, I usually just leave them in my inbox until the next day and deal with them first.

3. Each Friday afternoon, I devote an extra hour to longer emails

This is when I process my “Friday Folder.” These are emails that involve me doing some research or offering some counseling/pastoral advice. I usually process these in the order I’ve received them. Sometimes I get through three or four, sometimes less. If it looks like I won’t be getting back to somebody for a while, I’ll let them know that. I also use this hour to process any Facebook messages.

3. I check email twice on weekends

I take a quick look once on Saturday and once on Sunday and very rarely reply to any.

4. I do not check email on vacation

When I go on vacation, I set up an auto-reply specifying the dates I am out of the office and will not be responding to email. On the auto-reply, I give the email address of my assistant, Sarah, and ask them to contact her if there is anything that cannot wait. She then decides whether to contact me by text or to just ask the person to wait.

5. I have standard replies for my assistant

I have 4-5 standard replies for my assistant to send to common questions and enquiries. These include requests for counseling/advice, preaching/speaking, book reviews, book endorsements. I used to use this more and need to get back to it again (my fault, Sarah!).

6. I delegate some replies

Sometimes I ask my assistant or a student to answer an email for me. I may give some brief guidance and leave the exact wording to them.

7. I delay some replies

If someone is emailing me too much, I will often delay answering for a few days or a week or so. I don’t do this very often, but I have found that delaying replies lowers expectations and eventually reduces unnecessary emails.

8. I don’t feel obliged to answer every email

Email has made it possible for just about anyone to access us at any time of the day (or night) with a request or a question that may take 15-30 minutes to answer. There have been times in my life when I could have filled most of my working day with answering such emails from people I’ve never known or met. I no longer feel obliged to do that. I used to feel guilty if I didn’t respond. No longer. My primary responsibilities are to the Seminary and congregation that have called me (and pay me) and I should feel guilty if I am not serving them in the way I have promised. So, often, I will ask my assistant to explain that I cannot answer due to my moral obligation to serve my employers.

9. I keep junk out of my inbox

This is a constant battle but I regularly purge my inbox to ensure that it’s not being clogged up with newsletters, offers, promotions, spam, etc. It’s too distracting when I’m trying to process real email.

10. I turn off all notifications

I hate the idea of being constantly interrupted by beeps and banners on my phone or computer. I just think that’s insanity if we’re trying to do any worthwhile work and train our brains to think well and think deeply.

Hope some of these tips help you.  I realize some of them may not be applicable in your situation. And, as I said, I hope you can give me some tips too.

For more on Digital Detox go to the resources page.

Blogs

How to Boost Your (and Others’) Emotional Intelligence | Harvard Business Review
Here are five critical steps for developing EQ.

Dealing with Abusive Men
A powerful, powerful blog post.

The Exponential Growth of Classical Christian Education | Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, TGC
Here’s an encouraging education story — not many of these around:

On a Monday morning 17 years ago, Russ Gregg quit his job because of a sermon he’d heard the day before about ‘venturing something for God that’s a little bit crazy.’ So he left his position as development director for a Christian school in one of Minneapolis’s wealthiest suburbs in order to launch a classical Christian school in one of the city’s poorest, most violent neighborhoods. Without teachers, parents, a building, or financial support, Gregg was determined to love his neighbors as he loved himself. So he sought to give them the best education he could think of—a school like the one his own kids attended. Seventeen years later, Hope Academy has grown from 35 students in a church basement to 500 students in a seven-story school building. Among Hope’s five classes to date, 99 percent of students have graduated. In fact, almost every graduate (95 percent) was accepted at two- or four-year colleges, with a few receiving full-ride scholarships to private liberal arts colleges.

Grace-Fueled Obedience Is Absolutely Necessary for Christlikeness | Steven Lawson, Ligonier Ministries
“Many who profess Christ today emphasize a wrong view of grace that makes it a free pass to do whatever they please. Tragically, they have convinced themselves that the Christian life can be lived without any binding obligation to the moral law of God. In this hyper-grace distortion, the need for obedience has been neutered. The commandments of God are no longer in the driver’s seat of Christian living, but have been relegated to the backseat, if not the trunk—like a spare tire—to be used only in case of an emergency. With such a spirit of antinomianism, what needs to be reinforced again is the necessity of obedience.”

Opposites Attract | Leslie Schmucker, Desiring God
Well, this is raw. Not 100% sure about putting these kinds of things “out there,” but I link to it because it might be the means of keeping other couples together.

“I Got Gay Married. I Got Gay Divorced. I Regret Both.” | Denny Burk
“Many of those who marched for legal gay marriage in our country weren’t really that concerned about adding traditional marriage norms to gay relationships—norms of permanence, covenant, fidelity, etc. What they wanted was social acceptance of their relationships as they were already configured—many of which were admittedly ‘monogamish’ rather than monogamous. The legal recognition served to remove a stigma, not to convert ‘dexterity’ into permanence.”

New Book

War Psalms of the Prince of Peace: Lessons from the Imprecatory Psalms by James E. Adams. A second edition of a book that proved to be a breakthrough for me in understanding the Psalms.

Kindle Deals

Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith?: A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture by James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary ($5.99)

Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better by Brant Hansen ($0.99)

Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books by Michael J. Kruger ($5.99)

Video

A peak at the Family Worship Bible Guide from Reformation Heritage Books

On my recent vacation, I read Why Simple Wins: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters by Lisa Bodell. Although it’s a book written primarily for businesses, I took away a number of lessons not just for my personal life, but also for the Seminary and congregation I labor in.

The book addresses the complexity of modern life that is generating so much frustration and stress. It analyzes why so much unproductive and meaningless work fills our ever-increasing working hours, pushing out valuable and essential tasks that make work satisfying. It also proposes a number of doable solutions.

The Necessity of Simplicity
In essence, Bodell argues that we must move away from a mindset of more and complexity to less and simplicity. By eliminating low-value and redundant work and spending more time doing things that matter, simplicity can become a huge competitive advantage and a tremendous boost to personal health and work satisfaction.

The Possibility of Simplicity
And if anyone objects that they are not in a position where they can pursue or produce simplicity, Bodell insists:

Simplification is one of the most underutilized skills out there, but it’s also a skill that any of us can cultivate and deploy. And we must cultivate it. In our age of complexity, simplicity is one of the most powerful ways to add value and stand above all the mediocrity and complacency.

The Barriers to Simplicity
The greatest barriers to simplicity, says Bodell, are: meetings, accountability structures, performance metrics and evaluation, red tape, federal regulations and compliance, legal caution, reports, and technology. It’s the last barrier that I’m especially interested in as part of my digital detox.

Although we were all promised that technology would make our lives so much easier, Bodell admits, “Instead of eliminating tedious tasks, technology winds up eliminating time to do important things.”

The Complexity of Technology
The book presents a range of stats to back that up, including:

• The McKinsey Global Institute found that people typically devote over a quarter of their time— thirteen hours each week— to dealing with e-mails.
• Researchers at Bain & Company found that when you combine all the ways that executives can receive communication— phone calls, e-mails, IMs, etc.— the number of incoming messages the average executive gets has grown from a thousand each year in the 1970s to more than thirty thousand per year today.
• Each day, more than one hundred billion e-mails are sent and received, but fewer than a seventh of them are actually important.

The problem of complexity in general and technology’s contribution, in particular, is really summed up in this story:

Researchers at Bain & Company found that of the forty-seven hours the average mid-level manager or frontline employee works each week, twenty-one hours are spent in meetings with four or more people, and eleven hours are spent on e-mails and other electronic communication. Do the math: that leaves less than fifteen hours to get everything else done! Now subtract the unproductive time in between meetings and other obligations and you come to a startling conclusion: “The average manager has less than 6 ½ hours per week of uninterrupted time to get work done.” That’s less than one day per week.

And in case you think that multitasking can cure this, think again, because it’s part of the problem:

Studies have found that multitasking spurs the body to create more of the hormone Cortisol, and that an excess of Cortisol can impair your memory. In addition to all the other damage it does, complication actually makes the average employee more forgetful! Imagine the toll that levies on your average company.

Six Characteristics of a Simplifier
After challenging her readers with a range of questions that reveal whether we are complicators or simplifiers, Bodell provided six characteristics of a simplifier:

1. Courage: You are not afraid to challenge the status quo. You are comfortable with change and the unknown. You call people out who are being needlessly complex.

2. Minimalist Sensibility: You know the value of less. You seek to eliminate tasks or barriers that hold you back from doing more valuable work. You approach everything you do by asking, “Is this the simplest way to do this and still reach our goal?”

3. Results Orientation: Simplicity isn’t just about cutting costs for you. You do it because you want to get things done. You like clear outcomes and accountability.

4. Focus: You don’t give up. You stick with an effort that will help you reach your goals despite resistance. You see pushback as a way to get information and make your case stronger. You don’t let business-as-usual get in the way of simplifying things over the long term.

5. Personal Engagement: You “walk the walk.” You actively seek ways to simplify and you do it while empowering others to do the same.

6. Decisiveness: You like to move things forward quickly. You don’t let a consensus-driven culture slow things down unnecessarily.

So how would a simplifier with such characteristics address the challenge and complexity of technology? Have a think about that and leave a comment if you have something helpful to share. Tomorrow, I’ll give you some ideas about how I’m trying to simplify email in particular.

Here’s the video from my recent Facebook Live session in which I discussed the why and how of digital detox.

If you click through to the post on Facebook, you’ll see many helpful comments about how to digitally detox from people who participated in the event or watched afterwards. Unfortunately, due to a glitch, I wasn’t able to see the comments and questions during the broadcast, but I hope to have that fixed for the next time I do a Facebook Live — probably later this week.

The App that I mentioned is called Freedom.

For more on this subject go to the Digital Detox Resources page.