Conquering the Grad-Life Email Hydra

Okay, I kind of repeated the title of last week’s post. That’s because this post is mainly based on a 2017 article by Zach Hanlon, and in that article he compared his old email system to “slaying a hydra.” It’s been a year since I last read his article, so no, I did not get the hydra inspiration of the last post from him. But when I looked it up again for this post and noticed he also used the hydra reference, I decided to continue with it, especially since it’s remarkably accurate.

Anyway, if you want your email to look like this:

...then keep reading.

As already mentioned multiple times in this blog, graduate student life has many aspects. You’ve got your coursework, your research work, your laboratory duties, your actual job, your personal adulting life, etc. All of these have the potential to be a source of emails, and they can get messy. If your emailing system is like what my email system was a year ago (i.e. no system at all) then all these emails are probably just…there; just listed chronologically, unaware of what an eye-sore (and a headache) they are. 

The first step to having a clean inbox is to take a leap of faith and just archive everything. Select all your conversations and hit the archive button:

Doing so will instantly clear your inbox, and send everything to the All Mail folder, which should appear as a tab beneath the Inbox tab on the left side of your Gmail screen.

Now, here’s what I got from Mr. Hanlon’s article. From now on, every time you receive a new email, you will spend just a few seconds scanning it, and subsequently sorting it into one of several groups. In Gmail you can group your conversations by applying labels. You can create new labels by looking for the Label icon:

Do not sort your emails by topic, since an email thread can often change topics through time, and the sheer number of possible topics is just overwhelming. So, you should make labels according to urgency instead. Decide when you must reply to each email. The recommended labels are “Today”, “This Week”, and “This Month”. If you follow this, you will no longer be distracted by these emails when you should be working on something else. You can also use the “Move To” function (the folder-with-an-arrow icon to the left of the Label icon in the figure above) to automatically archive the email in the process, decluttering your inbox.

Mr. Hanlon adds that emails which contain useful information but don’t require replies can be sorted to one more folder, the FYI folder, for future reference.

This system has helped me a lot in the past few months, but I’ve found several ways to improve it further. My additions are:

1. The pending reply. I got this idea when my advisor sent me an irritated follow-up email because I forgot to reply to her previous email which she sent more than a week earlier. I thought she either had a very sharp memory or she had some sort of system in place that would notify her if an email she sent still hadn’t been answered. Since I don’t have a very sharp memory, I decided to come up with my own system. So, I made a new label called “Pending Reply”. Whenever I send something and I expect to be replied to, I move the conversation to Pending Reply.
2. Marking as unread. Whenever I add a conversation to one of the three labels that must be replied to, or to the Pending Reply label, I make sure to mark them as “unread” so that I see how many of them there are. (See the number “1” beside the This Month label in the first figure, indicating I have to reply to one email by the end of the month.)
3. Numbering and coloring. I edited the label names by adding numbers, to make sure the important labels are at the top of the list (since Gmail sorts them alphabetically with numbers first). I also colored them to match their urgency.
4. Sub-labels under FYI. I realized the FYI label can also get messy, so I added some sub-labels. You can do this by creating a new label and “nesting” it under an existing one. The sub-labels I made are still not topic-based but based on the general network of people involved in the conversations. The sub-labels I made are for family-, laboratory-, and work-related conversations for reference. You can also add one for your coursework, e.g. class announcements and emails from classmates.

In a way, this system is an extension of your productivity system, which we discussed in the previous post. You can even add an email to your Google Tasks to-do list by clicking on the "Add to tasks" icon.

I don’t know about you but sometimes when I’m working I check my email out of nowhere. It’s almost like a reflex when I get stuck on work. And when I have a new email, it will usually demand my attention and completely throw me off-schedule with regard to the work that I was supposed to be doing. But with an email system like this, I can scan the email, sort it, and forget about it until the time that I purposefully allot for emails. I don’t have to waste mental space and energy to accommodate that email, and that let’s me get back to a productive work session. I hope it works well for you too.