Episode 218 | Our 5-Step Process for Answering Emails, Managing Your To Do List and Staying Productive

Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 218 | Our 5-Step Process for Answering Emails, Managing Your To Do List and Staying Productive

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Show Notes

James over at Sweet Fish Media was kind enough to write up a summary of this episode. You can read that here.

Transcript

[00:00] Rob: In this episode of “Startups For The Rest Of Us” Mike and I discuss a five-step process to answering emails, managing your “to do” list, and staying productive. This is “Startups For The Rest Of Us” episode 218.

[00:10] Music

[00:18] Rob: Welcome to “Startups For The Rest Of Us”, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.

[00:28] Mike: And I’m Mike.

[00:28] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, sir?

[00:33] Mike: Guess what I got for Christmas?

[00:34] Rob: What? Did you get another iPad?

[00:36] Mike: No. I got sick.

[00:37] Rob: Yeah, and you guys were laid out pretty bad for several days, it sounded like.

[00:41] Mike: Yup.

[00:42] Rob: Well, for me, I leave tomorrow for a 48 hour retreat in Shell Beach. I have a long list of questions to consider. Once I come back from that I will have a much better idea of being able to solidify the goals. You know, when we did our goals episode I hadn’t yet done this retreat. So I do expect to revise that, and I think if it is dramatically revised I may mention it on the next show. I am definitely looking forward to that, trying to get some clarity for 2015.

[01:08] Mike: Very cool. Anything else?

[01:10] Rob: Yeah, my “trial-to-paid” conversion rate – with DRIP specifically, I mean it’s doing good with all apps, but with DRIP specifically – it dropped by over 20% in the last two weeks of December. And I had a nice big bucket of trials that were checking DRIP out, and then conversions just fell off a cliff. So, it’s such a bummer.

[01:27] Mike: Well, you can probably go back to them and shoot to them an email to them and say, “Hey, I know December was a rough month, in terms of being able to carve out time.” You know, you can extend their trials by another 21 days, or 14 days, or something like that after the 1st of the year, and see what happens.

[01:42] Rob: That’s a really good idea actually.

[01:43] Mike: Maybe try to bring them back. Even on Twitter it’s commented like, December of a terrible time of the year for bootstrappers in general, just because conversion rates just fall of a cliff, and everbody’s leads basically start to plummet, just because people get busy. I’ve actually avoided doing stuff – or signing up for stuff – just because I know that I’m not going to get to it. So I’ve kind of gone off into a hole and started working on stuff, because I know that there’s really not much point in me doing any of that stuff online, and I think that if you go back to them – at least if you have the email addresses, if they did start, you might be able to bring them back.

[02:14] Rob: Yeah, that’s a really good idea. I definitely have email addresses. They’re all in DRIP, and they’re marked as “folk whose trial has expired”. So it’s just a couple of clicks to send them an email. I’ll think about doing that probably next week. I like that idea. Just give them a link to re-enable their trial. Yeah, I’m kind of taking this week to take care of some year-end bookkeeping stuff. And also, I noticed that my Amazon S3 charges are creeping up, because of all of the database backups that we’re storing there. So I’m clearing out a lot of files and putting in a automated process to start clearing those out, because 6-7 months ago, when we really started getting stuff into S3 it’s just really, kind of, all sat there. So we don’t have a script, and we don’t have any type of policy that removes things. The S3 stuff crept over $300/month and I realized that we need to get in there. So, figuring out how to do that. I have a DBA who’s helping with that. So, kind of just doing that year-end stuff I otherwise wouldn’t really focus on during the day-to-day running of the business.

[03:13] Mike: Aside from being sick, the only other official news I have is that I’ve officially closed down Moon River Consulting as a business. And I believe that will be effective as of the 31st. So this episode will be out next Tuesday. So by the time this episode goes live I believe that the businesses will be completely closed, and the only thing I’ll have to take care of is taxes for this coming year. Then after that I can, kind of, wash my hands of the whole business.

[03:35] Rob: Nice. That’s a big milestone, man. It’s got to feel good.

[03:38] Mike: It does. It’s nice to know that going forward I’m not going to have two different sets of books, two different sets of checking accounts, two different lines of business that I have to worry about. I mean, I’ve still got some of that to begin with, but at least I don’t have to also think about, “Okay, well what checking account is this money going to go into?”. I feel like running the two businesses side-by-side has actually been a lot less helpful than I thought it would have been.

[04:01] Rob: Mmmhmm. And it’s not just the time and the decision process – that’s of course a big one – but then it’s the money of maintaining the corporations every year, of filing two separate tax returns. It seems like a pretty big win for you.

[04:13] Mike: Yeah. All of the associated overhead just of running a business is doubled because I have the two. So, It’ll be nice to kind of cut that in half.

[04:21] Rob: So the impetus for this week’s episode is that I’ve been asked about and explained my system for how I answer emails, how I manage “to do” lists, and how I stay productive at least five or six times in the past month. It’s kind of uncanny. I don’t typically get asked about this stuff, but I think since we recorded that productivity episode, folks have either emailed or Tweeted or asked in person. So I realize it’s probably time to document it in more detail, so that I can just refer folks to this episode. And I think you and I have some overlap in our processes too, and in essence, today we’re going to be walking through a five-step process to answering emails, managing a “to do” list, and staying productive.

[04:58] Mike: Cool. So let’s get started.

[05:00] Rob: So the first step of the process is to only check email once or twice a day. It’s to basically turn off all new email notifications, and then it’s to close the Gmail tab in your browser, and turn it off on your phone – so you’re not getting buzzed every five or ten minutes as emails arrive, and then only check it at a certain time. Now I check email twice a day. It may work for you to do it once. You may need to do it three times. But the idea is to not have it open, not constantly being pulled out of your flow. In addition, the times of day, I’ve heard widely debated. You know, people say, “Don’t check it first thing in the morning. Check it right before lunch and right before you go home”. Like 11 am and maybe 4 or 5 pm. I do, kind of, the opposite. I do right when I get in, because it helps set my to do list for the day. Then I tend to do it right after lunch in the early afternoon, because I find that I am not super productive in the early afternoon, and it’s a nice easy task that I can take care of. I do “time box” this when I check email, especially in the morning, because the morning is my most productive time. So I will tend to only spend about 30 minutes in the inbox, get a bunch of stuff into the to do list, and then I move into the to do list. Then in the afternoon I may not “time box” it. If it’s going to take me a couple hours to get through it, I want that to be afternoon time, where I’m going to be less productive as it is.

[06:14] Mike: I’m probably not nearly as disciplined about this as I would like. I almost always check my email early in the morning – sometimes it’s not until 10 or 11. If I get up really early, what I tend to do is I’ll check my email and clear it out, and then either close the Gmail tab, or I use a plugin called Inbox Pause. I find that helpful because it allows me to have my Gmail tab open, and it tells me flat-out at the top, “Hey, your inbox is paused.” So, if I happen to flip over there because I’m looking for that little kick that says, “Hey! You’ve got new mail.” I’ll see that right there and say, “Oh yeah. I shouldn’t be checking my email.” or “I’m not supposed to be in here because I’m not going to get anything anyway.” And sure, I can click that button, but the fact that I have to manually click that button to start getting to my email is a mental trigger, or reminder, that says, “Hey! You should be doing other things, and actually getting real work done.” So I find that helpful. I agree with you that getting things done in the afternoon is helpful. The other thing that I find helpful is clearing out email near the end of the night, because it helps me alleviate the mental strain of having the fact that there are some emails that were sitting there throughout the day, or at the end of the night, and I’m not thinking about them – which is kind of nice.

[07:26] So, if I can clear out my email and get it as close to Inbox Zero as I possibly can, I find that helpful to do near the end of the day, and in the evening. It would probably be better to just not check my email and maybe remove it from my phone, but I like having my email on my phone if I need it.

[07:41] Rob: Yeah. You bring up a good point, because these five steps that I’m using are during your workday. So if you have a regular schedule that you work – 9-5 or whatever – that’s where these steps come in. Outside of that, if I’m waiting in line somewhere, I will check email on my phone, because I consider that, kind of, found time. It is time that I wouldn’t be doing something productive anyways, and so if I can go in and check emails, and get a few replied to, get a few forwarded, and get a few deleted – that to me is actually a good way to do it. I think as long as you’re not compulsively checking your email all the time, and thinking about it, and you have that addiction thing – I don’t really see anything wrong with having email on your phone and checking it. I try my best not to check email or Facebook or Twitter when I’m with my family. I think that’s the big thing. When I’m working I want to be working hard, and when I’m playing and hanging out with my kids and my wife I don’t want to be thinking about work. Right? I don’t want to check email and have it suddenly stress me out, or remind me of something that I then can’t do anything about, so that I’m mentally shifted away from being present.

[08:45] So that’s where that balance — you, kind of, have to know yourself. But again, if I’m waiting in line and my family is not around, I’m not considering checking email and getting things done then a bad thing at all. I think it’s actually a way to be reasonably productive, instead of just standing around.

[08:58] So that was step one – was to check email twice a day. And I guess we would put the caveat in, except for if you’re standing in line somewhere and you’re on your phone. Step two, is to live by the Three Ds. The Three Ds are : to Do it, to Delegate it, or to Delete it. I’m going to start with Deleting it. So I’m not a big believer in saving things for later. In general, I don’t save many things for later. So if I’m not going to read an article now, probably 80-90% of the time I delete it. So I do get emails from Quora, emails from Growthhackers.com, emails from Bootstrappers.io, emails from Foundercafe. And they’re, kind of, showing me threads and conversations, and I’m either going to pop in quickly, comment, maybe skim something – but in general I don’t plan to read things later. That’s not the way that I work, because I find that that adds a big queue of this mental weight in the background, and something that I’m always thinking about.

[09:55] However, if you know yourself, and you do use a read later app – like maybe Instapaper or some other feature in your browser – and you do actually find time in the evening or over the weekend, and you like to have a queue of things that you’ve set up, then that’s maybe where you maybe wouldn’t delete those, right? You would put them in that queue and read them later. If I’m going to do it, I use Trello, and I wind up putting it into a side Trello board of the things that I do want to read later. I do that with FounderCafe threads as an example. If there’s something that I think I can reply to, and it’s going to take longer than a couple minutes, then I’ll actually just put a Trello item in there. But otherwise, I delete a lot of email. I get more than 100 emails a day, and I wind up deleting a lot of them. Even in the old days I probably would have kept some of these around thinking, “Boy, someday I’ going to need that information.” But I’ve found that you can typically find stuff via search, and in general, I’ve found that my productivity has dramatically increased by the fact that I’ve learned to skim, and I’ve learned to skim/read a lot fewer things than I used to. And that has allowed me to maintain a lot of productivity even though I have a lot of incoming stimuli and a lot of incoming emails. So, again, this first of the Three Ds is to Delete it. And I find that I delete very healthfully, and I delete heavily, and when in doubt I delete emails – rather than the Do or the Delegate.

[11:16] Mike: I was just going to mention an anecdote about Instapaper that I read at one point, which I’m sure I could find it, if I looked hard enough. But it essentially said that in Instapaper, if you had not read something, and it’s been more than 2 or 3 weeks or something like that – or maybe even a week – the chances of you ever going in and reading that are slim to none. And I think that the developers had written the article which basically just showed that once somebody gets to a backlog that’s more than a couple of days long, it’s almost like having a hundred RSS feeds coming in. It’s just like you can consume so much information and then have no time left to do anything else. So I do the same kind of thing that you do, but I also use UnrollMe. So anything that comes in from Quora and a ton of these other sources, I just have UnrollMe aggregate all of those. I get a single email with all of them. And I just go in and I very quickly review it. Most of the time it’s things from L.L. Bean or Amazon for various things – you know, most of them are promotional advertisements. And I don’t necessarily want to completely unsubscribe from everything, because I do want certain notifications. But having it as a single email that rolls up 20-30 other emails every single day, it alleviates the sheer volume of email that comes into my inbox. Because I can just quickly glance through quickly within that one email and kind of skip most of it. I don’t have to worry about it.

[12:35] Rob: Yeah, that’s a nice way to do it. I will make a note here that Gmail has the three inboxes with the promotional tab and that kind of stuff – social tab. I don’t do any of that, because it makes me feel like I have three inboxes to check. And I found that if it’s not 100% accurate, then I always have a doubt, “Am I missing an important email, a support email, or something I need to reply to?” And so I found myself checking all three tabs, both on the phone and in Gmail. So, me, myself, I’ve disabled all of that, and I like to have a single inbox view, and kind of do my own filtering.

[13:05] Mike: I do the same thing. I disabled that just because I didn’t like having the three different things. And I think the way you put it is probably the best. I hadn’t really thought of it in that way. You’re right, it’s like having three different inboxes. But in a way I do that now, because I have all these filters set up – I probably have like 50 different filters set up – that will take emails that come in to my inbox that match certain criteria, and just automatically apply labels to them. And some of them are marked as read, and some of them are not. So what will happen is it will end up in my list of labels on the left side in Gmail, and then it will be bolded, and it will show me the number that were sitting there because it was not marked as read yet. So I might need to go in and tweak my filters a little bit for some of them, but for the most part that works out pretty well. And in a way it kind of lend itself to that idea, where I have multiple inboxes. But I know that anything going into those that’s automatically labeled is not critical. So I can just let it go. And the nice part is that it doesn’t show up on my phone if I do that, because my phone only just goes straight to my inbox, which is kind of nice.

[14:05] Rob: Yeah. So an example of how I read through some startup news – or marketing news – this morning. I get a couple of different newsletters – like I said, Growthhachers.com, and the Mad Mark newsletter, and Bootstrappers.io. And if I have a busy morning, or I have a lot of stuff to do, I will just delete those outright as I go through my inbox. I won’t even open them. If I find that I think I might have some time during the day where I’m going to want to look at them, then I might Boomerang them back. We’ll talk about boomeranging in a little bit. But I’ll Boomerang them back in the afternoon, and I will typically timebox about 10 minutes to look through all of them. I skim through the titles and look at what’s interesting, and I open them all at once – so I’ll open six or seven tabs of anything I find interesting. Then I delete all of those emails – as you said, if you do UnrollMe they’re all in one email that you can delete, which is even better. Then I’ll go through each tab, I’ll skim through it, and I’ll figure out, “Am I going to get anything out of this?” or — a lot of these posts I find are so short anyways, that the title basically gets you to click, and then there’s nothing actually of value in them. So, I’ll go through them, I’ll figure out, “Do I want to Tweet this? Do I want to pull it into a podcast outline later?” – in which case I’ll go into the Google Doc and I’ll make a note of it for the next week.

[15:09] “Do I want to make a note in a marketing plan?” Like if there’s a new marketing approach, or it’s kind of a walk-through of like, “Here’s a new tweak to Facebook ads.” or something. Then I will actually pull a link to that and I’ll put it in the HitTail or the DRIP marketing plan. Or if it’s something else that I then want to look into in the future, I will then go put it in Trello, and I’ll say, “Research YouTube re-targeting.” and I’ll prioritize that. So what I’m trying to do is take really actionable items, very quickly, from these things that you could otherwise spend an hour reading through. So I’m trying to distill it quickly down to what action items am I going to take away from this, and not reading through a bunch of “entreporn” that you’re just looking to read some success story of someone that isn’t helpful, and isn’t going to move my business forward anymore.

[15:54] So that was the first of the Three D’s. The Three D’s again are : Do it, Delegate it, or Delete it – and we just talked through deleting it. The second one I’m going to talk about is Doing it. So any email if it takes between three and five minutes – anywhere less than five minutes – I try to handle it immediately. This is where I will Timebox things, and do the most important ones first. But I like to not handle emails more than once if possible. So if it’s just going to take a couple of minutes, and it’s worth doing – and that’s a big caveat there. I found that early on in my career I replied to everyone, all the time, any partnership opportunities. You know, you’re just trying to claw your way forward, and you’re doing any interview people ask about, or doing joint ventures and that kind of stuff. I find that now a lot fewer things move my needle, both on my personal brand side and the software side. So I’m pretty choosy about even what emails I’m able to fully reply to. I try to reply to everyone who emails and maybe say, “Hey, just not interested right now. No thank you.” is sometimes my reply. If I can do that very quickly I tend to lean towards replying no to most things, unless there’s a really compelling reason to reply “yes”. I don’t tend to spend a lot of time thinking about whether I should go forward with a partnership, because unless it’s a “Hell Yeah!” – like Derrick Sivers says, “Unless it’s hell yeah!” – I’m just going to have to say “No”. Because I have so many other opportunities going on, and the opportunity cost of even spending five minutes and thinking about it is just too much time these days. So you have to weigh where you are in your process – early in your career versus maybe later in your career.

[17:24] Mike: I think I have a bit of a harder time doing this, just because there are some things that will take me only a couple of minutes to do, and a lot of times I’ll just batch them up instead. So I don’t take care of them right away, but I’ll say, “Okay, well these three or four things, I’ll come back to them later in the day when I feel like I’m going to block off that time. Some of those things will just sit in my email box for a little bit longer than they probably should, and I do handle them more than once. I don’t know whether there’s a great way to do that. So, for example, I have an email sitting in my inbox right now for renewing part of my Microsoft Partner Network benefits. And I know that I’m going to get another one next month. So it’s like, “Do I even bother with this right now?” And a lot of times those things tend to fall much lower on the priority list, just because I know that I’m going to get another notification, and if I don’t get to it now it’s not a big deal.

[18:12] Rob: Right. Yeah, for that one particular I would either just delete it outright – if I know I’m going to get one – or I would forward it into Trello. That sounds like it’s going to take at least five minutes – or maybe more, by the time you find your login, and update your info, and do some clicks. Then you know there’s something you’ll have to read in “Terms of Service”. So I would probably put it into Trello, unless I clicked through and it was literally one or two clicks and I could be done.

[18:35] Mike: And maybe this is because it leans more towards the higher end of the five minutes – more towards the “I’m not absolutely sure how long this is going to take.” It might take five minutes. It might take me 30. And forwarding it to Trello, though, doesn’t necessarily either because I know that I’m going to get another email about it.

[18:52] Rob: So I probably would have done it by then – my stuff doesn’t stay in my Trello board very long, I mean I get it done pretty quickly. But if it was still in Trello when I got the next email I would delete that right away, because it’s already captured. It’s already in the to do list, and I’m already working out of the to do list. The Three D’s we’re talking about, I do very quickly, and I try to get out of my inbox as quickly as possible. I don’t work in my inbox. Then I will shut it down, and I move to Trello, and I start hammering all of the stuff that’s in there. So for this one, yeah, you can either do it – if you think it’s going to be less than five – I’d do it. If I have a feeling, like you said, it could be 15 or 20 minutes, I’d forward it over to Trello, archive the email – I’d label everything and archive it, it’s all with keyboard shortcuts of course – and then I would move onto the next email.

[19:34] Mike: Sure. That makes sense.

[19:35] Rob: And then the last of the Three D’s is to Delegate it. So if I can’t do it quickly, if I can’t delete it, I delegate it to one of two places. I have a virtual assistant, or I have my own to do list. So, for my to do list, as I mentioned, I used to use pen and paper, and that worked okay but it just got too complicated, so I’ve moved to Trello. There’s a bunch of other to do lists – I know you don’t have to use Trello – but the reason it works for me is because I love being able to just hit the “F” key in Gmail, type in “TRE” and it pre-populates with my Trello email address for my “to do” board. It’s all done very quickly via keyboard shortcuts. The email is gone, and it’s now at the top of my Trello board for when I do actually start doing things, I can prioritize quickly, and get on with my day and actually start being productive.

[20:21] Mike: That you try to get in and out of your mailbox as fast as possible. That’s not something that I probably tend to do, but it probably is something that I should start doing. Because sitting in your mailbox is not necessarily productive. It doesn’t really move your business forward. Unless you’re doing a lot of email exchanges with people, where you really need to do those email follow-ups. But for the most part I think that most of our businesses do not necessarily live and die through our email. It’s all of the other things that we’re doing.

[20:45] Rob: Yeah, that’s right. And obviously email can be a major time suck, you know? I find that since I can’t re-prioritize and reorder emails in Gmail that you’re constantly scanning through all of the emails in your inbox, and figuring out, “What’s the next priority? What’s the next priority?” So it’s this decision progress, it’s a scanning process – that’s what I’m trying to remove. I’m trying to do that once, through this triage – the Three D’s. Trying to get it into Trello, get it deleted, get it delegated – forwarded to a VA if they can handle it – and then try to get to Inbox Zero – I don’t always, but I get pretty darn close, and then move into that Trello thing to actually, in the morning, start to crank to real to do’s that are moving the business forward, then coming back to email later. But again, I think a big rule that I’m trying to do is get out of the inbox as quickly as possible, and not handle emails more than once if possible. Obviously, if I’ve sent something into Trello, and I have to then go back into Gmail to pull up a link or something, typically it’s in the body of the Trello thing itself – because when you forward the email it goes into the Trello card. But if not, if I do have to get back into Gmail, then I will and I go search and find the email and I’ll pick up the link. So I do maybe waste 20-30 seconds there. But it’s not as if I’m forwarding 30, 40 emails a day into Trello. By the time I’ve done my Three D’s and I’ve triaged my inbox, I’ll get my inbox almost to zero – if not to zero – and I will maybe have added three to five items to the top of my Trello list.

[22:09] You know, a helpful scheduling tip from Nate Grahek, who was on the show, he uses “Assistant.2” for helping to schedule appointments. And so I’m still using the old-school way of emailing and asking, “When are you available between 9 am and 3 pm, Monday through Thursday?” Mike, I know you use a service. What is the url?

[22:28] Mike: I use Doodle.com. So what that does is you sign up for it and it gives you a special url. Then what you do is you send that url to somebody and it links into your Gmail calendar. I have it hooked up to my Gmail calendar and my wife’s, so that any time where I’m busy, or where my wife has essentially scheduled something for us. Like if she’s got a class that she’s teaching and I have to watch the kids during the day, then obviously it’s going to be a bad time for me to try and have a meeting for that time. So what will happen is that that time will show up as busy on the calendar link I sent to somebody else. So it, kind of, aggregates the two calendars together, and when I give it to somebody I say, “Hey, choose something between these hours, Monday through Friday.” And that way it will just show up, and it just says, “Mike Taber is busy” and it gives you that time chunk. And then the person can choose several other times that they want to have a meeting with me, and then they just say, “Create a meeting request.” and it will send it over to me. Then I can just – whichever one works the best for me – say “accept”, and then it puts it on my calendar, and sends them an email, and then we’re good to go. So it’s helpful for me because it allows me to send something – because I’m busy. I think Assistant2 is a little bit different, because it helps, kind of, from the reverse angle where you know that the other person is busy.

[23:44] Rob: Exactly. It sounds like either one of those could be a good fit. I think I’ll probably consider starting one of those up. I just haven’t optimized the scheduling part of my whole process. I’m still handling my own scheduling. A couple of notes on to do lists before we wrap up this second step of living by the Three D’s. Because these are some questions – as I’ve explained this to people over the past month – they have these questions, so I want to answer them. The first is I have essentially two to do lists. I have an “A Priority” and a “B Priority”. I also have a doing and a done list. These are called “boards” in Trello, but it’s just a list of things. The reason I like – doing I never use – I like the done list because I can look back for months and see things that I have done. I can also use it – like when we sit down to make notes on what we’ve done during the past week for the podcast – I typically go to my done list of Trello and say, “What have I been working on?”. It also gives me a feeling of accomplishment, just to see that I’ve been getting things done. And at the end of a year I can look back and see how far I’ve come, and it actually gives me things to review, and say, “What did I enjoy this year?” and “What did I not enjoy doing?”. So aside from the doing and done, my “A” list is everything I’m working on, and my “B” list is basically super-low priority. It’s things like, “Watch this video someone recommended that I deemed I should watch.”, “Read this exceptional blog post.” Take care of something that is not high priority. And I only move to my “B” list when I’m fried, frankly. It’s when I don’t have the energy to actually work, and I want to learn something new, or I just want to indulge in some content. And even then, if it’s a video I use MySpeed, which is a 1.5 to 2x player – so I never 1X these videos. I mean, these are not movies. These are actually like marketing videos, or maybe a video interview with someone that I can’t get via audio, or some type of presentation where I want to see the slides, or something. Those are my main “A” and “B” lists, and the structure that I use.

[25:37] Mike: I use a combination of a couple of different things. So, like in Trello, I have an “A’, “B” and “C” tasks set of boards. And then anything I need to be doing that’s, kind of, time sensitive or critical, goes under my “A” list. Then “B” list is for things that can take a little bit more time. And then my “C” list is for things I would like to do, but I will probably not get to in the near future. And the reality is that if I put something on the “C” list I kind of know mentally that, “Hey, I’ve written this down, so that if I ever need to search for it in the future I can find it.” But at the same time, I just know that I will probably never get to those things. And it’s pretty rare for something to go from my “C” list to my “B” list. Things swap back and forth between “B” and “A” occasionally. Things do go back and forth between “B” and “C”, but almost never will something go directly from “C” to “A”. I work from my “A” list. That’s just how I do it.

[26:27] The other thing that I do, to keep track of the things that I’ve done, is that I signed up for Idonethis.com, which basically just send you an email each day which says, “Hey, what did you get done today?” All you do is reply to it. I just give it a bulleted list of all the things I got done that day, and that’s it. What it does is keep track of all of that in a calendar, and I can go back and see all of the different things I have accomplished on any given day. I find that that’s fairly helpful for helping to keep me on track. Obviously, if something goes wrong during a day, and I blow my whole day doing stuff that I didn’t want to do, or hadn’t meant to do, I just throw it into that reply to Idonethis.com and it shows up there and says that I spent the entire day doing that. But it’s also obvious that I only got that one thing done.

[27:11] Rob: Another note on to do list structure. I live by one to do list. I have all my work, my personal, my HitTail, my DRIP, my MicroConf, my podcast. All of those to do items are on a single list. Because when I used to have lists for each one, I would spend several minutes – every time I finished a task – trying to figure out which list I should start working on next. I’d skim through all the lists, and look at them, and re-prioritize them, and five or ten minutes were gone every time I finished something. In my opinion, you want to remove that decision point. You want to make it once during triage, and then you want to roll with your momentum. So I don’t like interrupting my flow with useless decisions, and to optimize productivity that’s something that I do. And I’m able to keep that “to do” list pretty short, because I don’t stuff my “A” list with a bunch of crap. I triage it pretty healthfully, and I either put stuff on my “B” or I delete it or delegate it. I’m pretty guarded about what actually gets on that “A” list, and that’s the step I think a lot of people fail at. They just want to throw everything in there and then prioritize it later. But when you have two or three hundred items on that list it’s just not possible. So even with all the stuff I’m managing, and all of the projects I’m working on, I’m able to make it work with a single to do list that manages both personal and work stuff.

[28:22] I do have multiple queues and “wish lists” elsewhere. So I have an Audible.com wish list, where I keep all the audiobooks that I want to purchase and listen to in the future. So when someone tells me about a book, or I hear about a book on a podcast, hear an author interviewed – even if I’m in the car I can use Siri and say, “Send email to Trello.” It will say, “What’s the subject line?” and I will just put in the title of the book, and then say, “Send.” with no body. That goes into the top of my Trello board. The next time I go into Trello I can very quickly go into Audible, search for it, Boom! – add it in there. I just did that today with Sally Hogshead’s new book, “How the World Views You.” I heard an interview with her last week, and now it’s in a wish list somewhere, and I know that when I’m thinking about that, next time I’m in Audible and I have some credits and I want to get a new book, it’s right there where I want it to be. Same thing with Amazon. Same thing with Netflix. Then I do have some side Trello boards, that are things like projects I want to do with my kids that I heard about or maybe some IOS apps that are teaching how to program, or some science, or something that I want to work on with my kids. I do have those here and there, but these are not to do lists. These are more like lists keeping track of interesting things that I want to revisit later, and so that kind of stuff does not live on my main to do lists, because I don’t want it cluttering up what is my next task to get done for my work or my personal life.

[29:37] Mike: Yeah. So to go back a little bit to your single to do list. When you have stuff on there, do you have like, “Hittail marketing”, for example. Or do you have things, like, “Get a blog post entry for Hittail done that says this…” and then you have like three or four other things that are related to Hittail. Is that on your main list, or do you just have the one line item that says, “Hittail Marketing”, and then off to the side you keep a separate list for all the different things that that would entail?

[30:03] Rob: No, anything on my list is super-specific and super-actionable. Because if I have “Hittail Marketing”, what does that even mean? If I feel like, “Wow! I need to do some Hittail marketing.” I might have a Trello to-do that says, “Check Hittail marketing plan, and pull two or three items into Trello to do” list. Like that would be a “to do”. Then I would go in and think about “What’s next?”, and “What do I want to do?” – I have a contact calendar now, actually, or a marketing calendar. But I would go to the game plan, I would then pull them in, and I would add the three items, and I would prioritize those. Today I have a couple of personal issues. I have to book my son in a camp and I have to send a new contract to somebody and I have to do a final read-through of a WordPress plugin page and add some content to it. So, that’s how specific things are. It’s that when I get there it is an action item. If it is a brainstorming item, then I will put it as such. Like, “Brainstorm new ideas and create them into actionable “to do’s” to loop back to the list.”

[30:59] Mike: Yeah. That’s, kind of, what I was getting at, because it wasn’t clear how you were putting those things into your single to do list. You said that there are different queues or wish lists that you have that are basically just lists of stuff. And I have some of those for AuditShark, and a couple of other things I’m working on, where it’s just, “These are the lists of things that need to get done for it.” And what I’ll do is I’ll put it on my Trello board that says, “Do this.” or “Spend time on this.” And what I do is I say, “Okay. Well, if I’m going to work on that, then I need to go over to this other place where I’ve got a list of 30 or 40 different things.” And I’ll spend two hours executing on some of those things. So I don’t keep that entire list of 30 or 40 things on my main “A” list, because it would just get overwhelming at that point. So I almost have a two-level hierarchy at that point. But not everything in there has that two-level hierarchy. Some of it is just one.

[31:47] Rob: That’s a good point. I have the same thing. I have these marketing game plans for all the different products, and so that may have hundreds of bullets in it. But you can’t have that in your to do list, because you’re not doing all of them soon. So I guess I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but I don’t want anything on my to do list that I’m not going to get done here in the next week or so. If it’s something that needs to get done months or years down the line then it should be somewhere else. It should be in a goals list. It should be handwritten in my notebook as a goal for 2015. Or it should be – like you said – in a second-tier list of all the things that have to happen for that product that I can revisit periodically.

[32:25] Mike: Yeah, I think the difference between the way we do it is that you have those secondary lists, and so do I. But what I do with them is I work on them and then I leave them in that secondary list, and just mark them off over there. Versus what you do, is you go over to that secondary list, probably delete them or archive them or whatever, and physically move them from there into your “A” list on the Trello board, to say “This is what I’m working on now.”

[32:46] Rob: Yup. That makes sense. So the third step, after Live by the Three D’s is to Aspire for Inbox Zero, but realize that it’s not always feasible.

[32:55] Mike: How many emails are you up to right now?

[32:58] Rob: Right now, since it’s mostly a vacation week, I have 27 emails in my inbox. Today we’re recording. I’m not actually working today, so I didn’t go through this process. If I had, I would probably be down to under five emails in the inbox, and everything else would have been delegated, deleted, or in Trello at this point.

[33:17] Mike: Yeah. I’ve got 21 right now. Then there’s a bunch of them that I can definitely get rid of, but I haven’t sat down to spend the time to go through. I didn’t get a chance to really work today, because I had to take my kids to the dentist, and I had to go to the bank, and I had to file paperwork to close Moon River Consulting, and all of this other stuff. It’s just like I really just have not gotten to my email. I mean, there is a ton of stuff I could have deleted already, but there is a lot of stuff in here that I haven’t gone through that process to actually take care of all the stuff that isn’t going to take me very long.

[33:46] Rob: Right. I think that’s a good point. I don’t view email as this stressful, real-time thing – as I think some people do. They want to instantly reply to every email, and they want to get back to people within a couple of hours. That’s not how I do it. I don’t think that my schedule should be set by a person sending me an email. I don’t think that – they shouldn’t be able to get something on my to do list unless I want it to be there.

[34:07] Mike: That’s a really good point. It was a hard lesson for me to learn early on. I wanted to be super-responsive, and felt like if I was super-responsive to other people, not only would that be reciprocated, but it would also help my business move forward quickly. The fact is that it’s just so blatantly false that it’s hard to comprehend when you’re first getting started. Because those things just do not matter. There’s been emails that have sat there for two, three or four weeks before. At some point they fall off the radar and they become immaterial. They don’t matter at all at that point. If it’s waiting for three days, it can wait for a fourth. It’s not that big of a deal.

[34:42] Rob: Yup. The fourth step of five is to use Boomerang and your calendar liberally. So what I used to do – this is years ago – I used to use a “tickler file”. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that term, but you would basically have a file that was 12 months of the year, and then you would have another multi-file in each one of those, for each of the four weeks. And if you needed to remember to do something on December 14th, then you would go to your December file and you would go to the second week, and you would place a piece of paper in there that said like, “Revisit this.” But this has become so much simpler with either Boomerang or your Google Calendar – or whatever calendar you use. So Boomerang is a Gmail plugin, and it allows you to not only send email later – which is a cool side benefit – but it allow you to take an email that you do not want to respond to today, can’t respond to today – because you don’t have the information, but you know that you’re going to have the information in a week or two. And you can just – I hit the “B” key, and say, “Next Monday, 10 am”, I hit enter and it’s out of my inbox, and it’s back in my inbox next Monday. So examples of things that I’ve done with this recently are : we’re constantly getting requests to be notified when MicroConf dates are set. We’re still trying to get a contract back from the hotel. I don’t have the dates yet, by I’m assuming that I’ll have them by next Monday. So I have like six emails now that have come in that I’ll reply to and say, “Hey sorry. Not yet. I’ll let you know.”

[36:04] And them I’m boomeranging them back to me next Monday. Now, obviously at a certain point that doesn’t scale. It gets to be too many. It never has. I’ve never had 50 emails Boomeranging back to me in the same morning. These things tend to space themselves out. Another one is, I sell quite a bit of stuff on Amazon. I just like to sell used stuff that I have. I don’t keep it around. And I’ll often be at my apartment near the beach, and I don’t have the stuff to pack it up. I don’t even have the thing that I need to ship, but that email comes in. And I know that I want to be notified of it when I get back to the house, so that I can ship the stuff. So what do I do? Well, I Boomerang that for the day – the morning of – the time when I’m getting back to the house. So those are two, kind of, simple examples. But it’s ways to keep clutter out of your inbox, and for it to come in just in time. You can also – if you don’t want to use Boomerang – just use a calendar event, right. Go in at 9 am that morning and remind yourself, “Hey, this blog post is going live.” I have like a recurring event in the calendar that reminds me “A blog post is going live on the DRIP blog. It’s been scheduled and that morning you need to schedule the Tweet, and do this and do that.” There’s some steps that have to get taken. So, that’s why step four is to use Boomerang and your calendar liberally to keep your inbox clear.

[37:10] Mike: I use Boomerang for basically the same types of things, because I’m getting the same types of emails from people asking when Microconf dates are, so they can plan around them. One of the things that Boomerang does not do is that it does not send you emails unprompted. So one of the things that I like to do – like for our Mastermind group call – we maintain a Google Document that basically outlines all of our previous conversations, and what our to do lists are for the current week, and what we’re supposed to be working on so we can discuss it next week. I actually went into Zappier and set up an email based on a schedule that sends me an email with a link to that document every Monday morning. It actually goes to me and to the other people who are in my Mastermind group. It’s very helpful, because it comes in every Monday, but we only meet every other Monday. So what happens is if I forget to go look at it, and we meet on a Tuesday night, and then the following Monday I get that email. And even though we’re not meeting that week, it’s a reminder “Hey, go check this document and make sure that you’ve at least started working on this stuff.” Because if I were to get it every other week, and I only have a day to work on the stuff because I forgot the previous week, that would obviously be fairly detrimental to my progress on a weekly basis – because I might get sidetracked. But I find that having that email come in every week helps me. But you can use Zappier to send you email notifications on a schedule to do different things. If you have a marketing calendar than that’s fine – you can have those things automatically added. But if you need emails, or anything like that, sent to you on a regular basis for that kind of stuff, I find that that’s very helpful.

[38:41] Rob: I like that. That’s a good hack. Step five is to do the work. It’s to close emails, to turn off notifications, and it’s to move into your to do lists. So, for me, it’s to move into Trello. I prioritize today – pretty much only today. I figure out what has to get done, so I don’t go through my entire to do list every day, but I skim through the top 10 or 15 things, maybe 20. I’ll move the stuff to the top, and then I start looping music and enjoy productivity. And I don’t come back into my email inbox for several hours.

[39:10] Mike: I don’t necessarily prioritize just today. I also try and prioritize things throughout the week, because there’s obviously long-term projects and stuff that you’re working on, that you know that you’re not going to be able to finish all the work on any given day, and it’s going to take several days. So, I will prioritize things a couple of days into the future. So for certain longer-term things I’ll say, “Okay. I’m going to work on it for two or three hours today, and then I’ll work on it for a couple of hours the next day, and the day after that.” But I use that primarily for those things that I know I’m not going to be able to finish in a single day, or a single sitting.

[39:38] Rob: That’s interesting. See, I would break those things up into smaller tasks. So if you had something that’s like a 12 hour task, I would actually break it up into its components, and figure out what 2-3 hour blocks it could be crunched down into.

[39:52] Mike: Yeah, this is writing for my book. Depending on how I feel, or what comes to mind when I’m sitting down to do it, I may feel like writing about a certain topic, and I may not. So that’s where I just start breaking out, and say, block off blocks of time to do this. I don’t necessarily block out specifically what I’m going to be doing during that time. It’s just, you know, “Spend these three hours working on that.”

[40:14] Rob: Yeah. I can see doing that.

[40:15] Mike: But I just, kind of, pull from the outline at that point. It’s like, I get to the beginning of that three-hour block and I say, “Okay. Go to the outline for it, and then look from there.”

[40:24] Rob: Yup. That makes sense. That’s probably how I’d do it as well. So to recap, our five steps to answering emails, managing a “to do” lists, and staying productive are, Step 1 : Check your email once or twice a day, Step 2 : To live by the “Three Ds : Delete, Delegate, or “Do It”., Step 3 : Aspire for “Inbox Zero”, but realize it’s not always feasible, Step 4 is to use Boomerang and your calendar liberally, and Step 5 is to do the work.

[40:47] Mike: If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690, or email it to us at : questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Out Of Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for “Startups” and visit www.startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.