Take Back Control of Your Mailbox With These 9 Techniques of Eric Schmidt, Former CEO of Google

#3: Clean out your inbox constantly.

Emails have become our daily lot. For many, it is even one of our first working tools. We send at least a dozen emails every day. We respond to email solicitations frequently, whether for business or personal reasons.

In 2019, a research report from Radicati found that the average worker sends and receives an average of 126 emails per day.

This number seems huge at first glance, but if you take into account the spam you're bound to receive, you'll see that this figure is quite relevant. Research from the Harvard Business School even showed that the number of emails received increased by 5% during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For your emails not to become a major hindrance to your productivity, you will have to regain control over your email box. If this problem of emails piling up endlessly affects everyone, some have adopted radical measures to put emails back at the service of their productivity.

This is the case of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google.

In the book “How Google works” published in September 2014, Eric Schmidt tells how he took this problem head-on by applying 9 techniques that you owe it to yourself to try.

Respond quickly.

This first technique used by Eric Schmidt is probably one of the most important. In an asynchronous message mode, responding quickly to your callers is the best way to show them that you care.

Even a short, quick message back can be enough to build a culture of trust in a company.

This will create a positive interaction loop while also emptying your email inbox more quickly, which otherwise tends to grow indefinitely while waiting for you to deal with your emails. Responding quickly, therefore, has a double positive effect that you can't ignore to take back control.

When writing an email, every word matters and useless prose doesn’t. Be crisp in your delivery.

In an email, every word counts. Keep your writing short and to the point. Unnecessary prose has no place in an effective email. Of course, describing a problem requires more time on your side when writing an email. But it will prove to be much more effective afterward.

To remind yourself of this, you can think of novelist Elmore Leonard's answer to a question about his success as a writer:

“I leave out the parts that people skip.”

Most emails are full of things that people can ignore. To save other people time, you need to remove anything unnecessary from your emails so you can focus on the essentials.

Clean out your inbox constantly.

If you are like me, but also like most people, I guess you waste time every day looking at your email inbox wondering which email you will try to process next. You are wasting time re-reading emails that you had already seen once, but had not yet processed.

So you need to change your approach.

When you open a new email, you have these options:

• Read enough of the message to realize that you don't need to read it.

• Read the message and act on it.

• Read the message and act later. This concerns a message that is important to read, but too long to read in its entirety at the moment.

The best thing to do is to decide directly what to do with your email while prioritizing the first two options. By applying this technique correctly, your email box will be stripped of all the superfluous stuff and will be transformed into a to-do list of complex issues to deal with.

The final touch is to transfer these emails to a special folder called “Take action”.

Handle email in LIFO order (Last In First Out).

Even with Eric Schmidt's techniques, you may find yourself overloaded in your email box at some point. To avoid dealing with emails that are no longer current, always focus on the last ones received.

Manage your emails in LIFO mode. For IT people, this should speak for itself: Last In, First Out.

Remember, you’re a router.

When you receive emails, you should think like you are a router. Don't hesitate to forward incoming emails to others who may be relevant to the conversation at hand.

This will help move topics along with more quickly within the company.

When you use the bcc (blind copy) feature, ask yourself why.

The bcc feature is used too frequently when it should be limited to specific cases. Whenever you are tempted to use it, Eric Schmidt advises you to ask yourself why you are doing it.

The answer is almost always the same: you are trying to hide something, which is counterproductive and potentially negative in a culture of transparency that should be the norm in business.

When you send an email, copy people openly or don't copy them at all. This is a golden rule to apply when managing your emails.

Don’t yell.

Many people take advantage of email to be aggressive in their communication. It is indeed much easier to do so electronically. If it is easy, it shows a lack of courage, but above all a lack of respect for your interlocutors.

Use email to communicate effectively, but never to yell. If you must yell at someone, go directly to them and do it face to face.

Make it easy to follow up on requests.

When you send an email to someone with an expected action from them, get into the habit of using a label to file that email. If you don't get a response from the person you're talking to, you'll find it easier to notice. Also, email management applications allow you to enable automatic reminders for this type of wording if you haven't gotten a response after a certain amount of time.

Help your future self search for stuff.

When you receive an email that could be useful in the future, you can classify it using dedicated labels that you will create for the occasion. You can choose to forward the email to yourself by adding keywords that will make it easier for you to search in the future.

This will save you time in the future while keeping your email box clean.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to manage your emails correctly is a necessity in a world where email has become an essential communication tool in companies but also in the family world. By applying Eric Schmidt's 9 techniques, you will be able to regain control of your email inbox to put it at the service of your productivity.