Welcome to How I Work, as show about the tactics used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor, I'm at the INBA, I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy in Ventium, and I'm obsessed with ways to optimize my work date. This episode is another my favorite Tip episode. The title is probably pretty self explanatory. It's about my favorite tip from each of the interviews
I conduct. So on today's show, my guest is Laura may Martin. Laura is the executive Productivity advisor at Google. So how on earth did that happen? So? Laura started at Google almost ten years ago in the Ann Arbor office, and shortly after she joined, she started a twenty percent project and developed an internal training program on how to
manage your inbox effectively. Her continued passion for productivity has basically developed into a full time role where she works one on one within executives at Google and also runs the Productivity at Google program for all employees. Now, my favorite tip that I got from my chat with Laura was about how she manages her inbox. And trust me, I've done a lot of reading about email and how to be really efficient at it, and I learned some really awesome stuff from Laura. So on that note, let's
head over to my chat with Laura. I want to know about email because you mentioned when you were doing this as a twenty percent project, and I love that your role came out of a twenty percent project. That sounds very Google And so email was the first thing that you were helping people with. And I imagine you've
probably developed your email management strategies a lot. Are what are the most important things people need to be thinking about with email, and perhaps other than batching, But I would like to know actually what your view is about batching, how that works, and maybe how that works in your own life as well.
Yeah, so I do. I do promote batching, and the way that I explain this when I'm coaching or leading my courses, I say, totally forget about email and think about your laundry because that's something that everyone does or knows how to do. And so if you pretend that your dryer is your inbox, and you imagine how a
lot of people are doing email right now. They go in, they grab one shirt, they fold it, and they walk it all the way up to their dresser, and then they walk all the way back down and then maybe they find a pair of pants and it's still wet, and they think, oh, I'll just throw it back in there with all my dry clothes. You know, maybe that's mark is unread because you don't want to deal with
it right now. You know, you find one sock, but you don't know where the other sock is, but you put it away anyway, knowing you're going to have to go back so and then you know, by the end of it, you're like, you know, I just I'm just going to start the dryer all over and look at it again tomorrow. And it's like, how how stressful would that be for doing laundry Because a lot of people are doing their email like that, they're picking and choosing.
So with your laundry, you're saying, Okay, it's my time to empty the dryer. Even if I can't finish all this out, I'm emptying everything and then I'm putting it in piles. These are things I need to fold, These are things I need to hang, These are socks I need to match. Then you're fold, fold, fold, fold, folding five things in a row and walking them all upstairs.
So even if that's where you have to leave it and you have to come back to hang hang, hang, hang, and take everything to your closet, you're still in such a better mental place because you know the dryer is empty, so you know, if you're thinking about your inbox, A lot of people never empty their inbox in the sense that not that they've replied to everything, but that they've addressed the next action for everything. So in your terms,
batched it. And it's like if you walked by your dryer every single day and the door was open and you just kept seeing your clothes in there, you would constantly feel stressed, like so many clothes I need to get to versus oh, I have, you know, five things I know need to be folded. I know exactly what's
in there. So I do recommend the inbox zero mentality, meaning that you sort all of your emails as a separate activity, get to zero, and then read emails, answer emails all as separate activities versus you know, doing them all mixed together, which is where people lose a lot of energy and touch the same email you know, four to five times.
So can we get into the minuture or some of that. I love that image of comparing it to the clothes dry. I've never heard that before. That's so that's so powerful that I reckon. That's that's going to stick with me. How then, like when you're in the inboox, are you doing more of the like the microactivities in terms of sorting? What are the categories? What did the functionality that you're using, Like, what does that look like?
So I use Gmail obviously, and I use what's called multiple inbox, which is on or the inbox to have in Gmail. So the way I think of it is there's really only three actions that can go with an email, and that is one, it's something you need to do, meaning you plus time would complete that activity. So a lot of people muddy up to do with things that they know they can do once they hear from so and so you know that's not what I put in
to do. It's if I sat down tonight, I'm going to clear out my to do so I have to do waiting, which is things that I need to follow up on but are not directly my action, and then things I need to read and so multiple inboxes basically it's called multiple inboxes, but it's really multiple views or multiple windows. So I base I have my left side,
which is my dryer. Everything comes into that, and then I use the right side inboxes of multiple inboxes, and I say, in my first section, show me anything I've labeled to do. In my next section, show me anything I've labeled waiting and read through. So essentially, multiple inboxes lets you peek into a certain folder or label without having to open it. So it creates more of a dashboard where I can see incoming emails and I can see things that I've addressed into my piles.
Rot and so then on a daily basis, and I see you checking email at least once a day.
Yes, So I know a lot of people say and this, If you ask me my two rules on email, it would be one treat it like laundry, and to close it one to two times a day. So I don't recommend, you know, only look at your email once because a lot of people's jobs, the way we communicate, now that's just not realistic. You know you're going to miss something that is for the next meeting or something like that.
So I really say, like it can be open, but you really should close it if you've set time to work, so I check my email, you know, throughout the day. But the structure of how I'm the workflow, I guess, is what you're asking. It's basic. I open my inbox in the morning, I get to zero, so I go through each email in chronological order without popping back to the main inbox. So I use something called auto advance.
It forces me to go to the next email versus going back to the dryer and picking out whatever I want that looks shiny. It's like, no, I'm going to the next thing I got, and I either archive the email or I put it in a folder. So in Gmail, you can archive without putting it in a label. So I either delete or archive, or I put it in one of those three buckets. So I go through get to inbox zero doing that, and then I match my
email based on my energy. So if I then have two hours of uninterrupted time, I know that I really can dive into some of those to dos, and so I open that folder. Only I don't look at the
rest of my inbox. I just turned to the clothes I need to fold, and I, you know, go through each one of them and fold, fold, fold, But then everyone knows how you have that afternoon time where you know, especially with if you're one of the early morning chronotypes, and you have this like two thirty to three time where you're not really going to get that much done. You're not going to respond to those big, big emails because you're probably low energy and you only have thirty minutes.
So that's when I go through my read folder and say, Okay, what are these industry articles I want to read? You know, I can quickly pop through them so I don't waste that primo morning productivity time reading articles. And then I at the end of the day go through my waiting Every day I scan through that and say, is there anything that I'm waiting on that I could bump up right now or anything that's coming up with the deadline.
I get to inbox zero again before I leave for the day at work or before you know, I sign off at the end of the night. And then if I do pick up my phone or something, I'm seeing only new emails that have come in, and I know they're only the ones that I haven't address. So that's kind of my It's very detailed. I don't know how detailed you wanted it, but that's exactly how I do it.
That is it for today's show. If you know someone that is perhaps struggling to tame their inbox, why not share this episode with them and give them some practical tips and hopefully you've learned some cool stuff as well. So that is it for today and I will see you next time.