Before I get into this week’s thoughts, I wanted to let you know that I’m hosting a webinar with cybersecurity and tax expert Brad Messner, EA, on using artificial intelligence (AI) in your tax practice on July 30, 2024, at 3:00 pm Eastern. Brad owns Financial Guardians, an information security education and consulting firm. We’ll discuss regulations relevant to using AI in your tax practice; strategies to manage potential risks associated with using AI; and ideas for secure, effective AI applications in your firm. To register, click the button below:
Now, on with this week’s Thursday thoughts!
Email is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today.
— Ryan Holmes, founder and CEO of Hootsuite
I don’t have much to write about email that hasn’t already been written by plenty of productivity gurus, tech aficionados, and mental health experts. If you’ve never really thought intentionally about your relationship with email, I recommend the following to get started:
Read Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. For Allen, email is just another inbox, along with other physical and digital inboxes, that should be processed probably daily or at least weekly.
Watch “How I Answer Email in 17 Minutes a Day” by Tiago Forte. Tiago shows how to incorporate email into a complete digital system, including notes, tasks, and read-it-later.
Read A World Without Email by Cal Newport. For Cal, email locks us into what he calls a “hyperactive hive mind,” where collaboration requires constant focus on the inbox rather than the work itself.
I’ve felt fairly confident with my email situation for years now. I’ve always maintained two email systems: one for work and one for personal. I kept the two separate:
Work email has always been in the system predominantly used by my employer. The universities and the first accounting firm I worked at all used Outlook. My prior firm (JWellsCFO) and current firm (Steadfast) use Gmail.
Personal email has always been in Apple Mail, using my iCloud address.
However, my email situation has become more complex over the past year or so. I still maintain my JWellsCFO email along with my Steadfast email. Steadfast also uses another shared Gmail inbox. I’m also on the board of the Florida Chapter of the National Association of Tax Professionals (FL NATP), and we’ve set up email accounts for board members (Gmail).
That brings the tally to four separate Gmail inboxes. I use Chrome as my browser, which allows for separate profiles. Profiles let you open separate browser windows for each profile that look and act completely separately from the others, including logins, saved passwords, browsing histories, bookmarks, and settings. So to keep these parts of my work and professional life separate, I use a separate profile for each inbox.
But that means a lot of context switching throughout the day. And as Cal Newport says, I fall prey to the “hyperactive hive mind.” As I’m checking one inbox to see if I’ve gotten a reply, I start wondering about the others. And by the time I’ve checked them all, it’s been enough time that I wonder if there’s something new in the first one, and the cycle repeats.
Now I could set up automatic forwards and process all emails in one inbox. I don’t like that option for a few reasons:
It muddles the separations among these various domains in my professional life,
It increases the chance of erroneously replying from the wrong account, and
Gmail, despite being the most popular browser-based email client, doesn’t produce an accessible unique URL for each message, so I can’t link back to the message when I create a task in my tasks app. I could forward the email to Evernote (my notes app) and use that link, but that still isn’t the actual email, just a copy of it.
The other day, I read Josh Youngblood’s review of Superhuman. I’ve heard of Superhuman over the years and considered trying it a few times, but I could never justify the cost. Whenever anyone discusses Superhuman, the cost is the point of contention.
But Josh’s post reminded me of another Tiago Forte video I watched a few years ago—“How I Clear My Emails and Get to Inbox Zero.” In the video, he uses Superhuman. It seems to create a unique URL for each message. This is exactly what I want. So, I might take up Josh’s offer of a free month of Superhuman using his referral code.
Now your thoughts
How do you handle your email? Do you have a system for processing your inbox(es), or are you regularly dragged back into the hyperactive hive mind?
I want to thank you sincerely for reading this far. This issue is a bit of a ramble, which probably wasn’t easy to wade through. I hope you found something valuable here. I know you’re probably exhausted at this point and don’t need another task, but if you’re not already subscribed to Josh’s newsletter, please go do that!
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