Pete Mockaitis
Randy, welcome!

Randall Dean
It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited. We’re talking email. You are the Email Sanity Expert, registered trademark. So, I’d love to start by hearing a little bit in working with so many people and their email, is there anything that’s particularly surprising to you that you’ve learned about us professionals and doing email?

Randall Dean
Well, you know what’s interesting, I’ve been leading programs on this topic for 20 years now, started my company all the way back in 2004, and what I’ve learned over all this time is that not only are people spending, I think, the average that I saw in a published study was a little bit more than two hours per day, but at a lot of the conference events, conventions, places that I speak, I’m getting people answering anywhere from three to six hours a day just on their inbox.

The interesting contrarian fact and statistic that I’ve discovered, I ask people at these programs, I go, “How many of you have had prior training?” And if it’s an audience that I haven’t spoken with before, it’s less than 5%. Less than 5%, not just here in the United States, Canada, Mexico. I’ve spoken in Europe several times on this. And in all of those places almost no one has had strategic or technical training on how to be more efficient with their email on a tool that’s taking 25% to 50% or more of their workday. It’s crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s what’s funny is I think we have a sense, or I have a sense, and I think I’m getting the vibe from other professionals, that we’re spending “too much time” on meetings and emails. Well, first, I just want to check that assertion for validity, because I guess it’s conceivably possible that even if you are spending six hours on email a day, if most of these messages are thoughtful works of written craftsmanship in which you are casting a vision and offering clear guidance, and wisdom, and leadership, and insight, and clarification, and coordination that that might be okay.

Like, you’re doing work. You’re doing knowledge work at a high level. You’re spending six hours on email but those six hours are well-spent in these communications. Tell, Randy, how often is that the case? Or, is, in fact, our assertion correct, that that’s too darn much?

Randall Dean
I would actually say for the vast majority of people, they’re not doing what you just described.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Randall Dean
They’re dealing with 200 emails a day, and they’re trying, in a mass flurry, to get through them as fast as they possibly can, and they’re not writing terribly high-quality and high-level communications. They’re just trying to get through the flood of information that’s coming in at them. It’s funny because I actually talk about email etiquette sometimes and I’m actually of the point, like, make the subject line sort of say what is in the email.

If there’s tasks inside the email, make sure people, right up front, know who’s got what tasks. And if you can’t get down to bullet points, it’s almost the exact opposite of what you just said in terms of crafting really nicely crafted communications. And I actually even mentioned that, if you are going to write something that’s sort of wordy and requires extra time and effort to go through it, you should probably turn that into an actual document, like a Word doc or a PDF so that you attach it to the email, so people slow down and read it more carefully.

Because one of the problems that they have is if it’s sort of a long email in terms of message length and density, a lot of people are just scanning over the top of them and not getting into them because they’ve got too many coming in.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Randy, you’re bringing back a fun memory of my first kind of grown-up internship was at Eaton Corporation in Pittsburgh, and I was part of this program, and the one coordinating the program, her name was Amber. And it was funny, her email signature had “Thank you for your attention to this communication,” like in all of her emails.

And it was so funny, I don’t know if this is what she was going for, but it caused me, an insecure 19-, 20- year-old intern to say, “Oh, shucks, I didn’t actually spend much attention on your communication. I better read it again.”

Randall Dean
Yeah, and the thing is, I always tell people, “If somebody’s getting 150-200 emails a day, and you’re barraging them with a 14-paragraph soliloquy, and they miss something, is that really their fault for missing something? Maybe it’s your fault for not getting to the point, you know? So, yeah. Now that doesn’t mean you throw out all rules for appropriate grammar and etiquette.

But I also am a believer that email is best used when communications are simple, obvious, and straightforward. And the minute they start getting complex or confusing, it might be time to pick up the phone or go find the person.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or, I guess, we’ll talk alternatives and tools. I personally love the Loom video, if we’re remote and asynchronous, in terms of, “Hey, these are my thoughts on this matter and some detail. So, you can see my face, hear my voice, see the document, or whatever we’re talking about at the same time.” So, okay, understood.

It sounds like it’s quite rare that email time is time brilliantly spent, and we may, even if we do need to craft a beautiful something, it might be better off in a document. And so, the Tim Cook’s up early in the morning, emailing the day’s leadership wisdom for each of his key team members, it sounds like that’s not what most of emailing is.

Randall Dean
That’s really funny because, I mean, if you’re at Tim Cook’s level and his senior leadership team’s level, then maybe what you described at the start of this conversation might work. Most of the people that are coming into my audiences are administrative professionals, mid-level to low-senior level managers and directors, and they’re just dealing with a barrage of messages, and they’re trying to figure out what they need to get done within these messages, who they need to follow up with from these messages, and how to then turn that into a work day.

And so, a big part of what I’m doing is like, “Okay, here’s how you go through this stuff to figure out what’s important, what’s urgent and what’s not.” So, I think that that’s been a big part of the struggle.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I hear you. So, that’s kind of the email vibe we’re talking about here is tons of incoming things, kind of unprocessed, unsorted, that need to be gotten through. And I’m thinking we had Cal Newport, we talked about A World Without Email on the show, and he used the phrase, just haunting, “In some corporate environments, we are human network routers.”

Randall Dean
That’s a good way to put it. I like that a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of, “Okay, here’s a message that’s coming to me. Okay, I can do this thing. I can forward it. No, it doesn’t belong to me, it belongs over here, forward there.” So, for many of us, it’s about processing large volumes, and having help is awesome. Shout out to my producers. I just forward all my pitches to them and they know what to do. It’s like, “Read all of these thoughtfully and tell me which ones are fantastic finalists.” And so, I don’t read 90% of the pitches in my email, and that’s awesome that they do that for me. I greatly appreciate them.

Randall Dean
And that’s a perfect delegation right there, that not enough people, I think, are doing. And so, I always tell people, “If you’re more of a senior level in your management chain and you feel like you’re spending way too much time, especially on low-level emails, that’s a mismatch because you’re getting paid to do higher-level work than low-level emails.”

So, you got to find a way to sort of fix that a little bit. And it’s probably going to require a reallocation of some of the messaging so that you’ve got somebody else helping you with screening a bit. I think that’s a really good way to put it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I am tempted to jump into tips and tactics, but, first, maybe, can you orient us to, you mentioned, okay, almost none of us get training in this. Can you give us a glimmer of hope or inspiration? What’s on the other side of this? Let’s say we do get some training from this insightful conversation with Randy or more, what’s possible? In terms of when we’ve got our email game optimized, what’s the before-after transformation look like?

Randall Dean
I think email is what you could call a necessary nuisance. It’s something you have to deal with and we’re not going to get rid of it. I don’t see anywhere on the horizon where email is going to completely go away. But when you think about what it is, the vast majority of what’s coming in are what I basically say are a whole bunch of hungry squirrels with the occasional big angry dog, right?

And so, basically, you’re trying to figure out, “Which one of these is the big angry dog that’s barking? And how do I reduce the distraction of all these hungry little squirrels?” And so, when you say “What’s on the other side?” I think having a logical triage mentality with processing your emails that requires some new habits.

But if you get into the habits, and you do it well, you will look at your emails less times per email, you might look at your inbox less times per day in total, you will be able to better identify what’s really important or urgent, and you’ll end up without such a big cluttered mess so that it’s not a distraction in and of itself.

You know, I would bet almost every program I’m into, maybe 15-20% of the audience has more than a thousand emails in their inbox that haven’t even been filed or deleted. And I mean that’s common. So, if you’re in that boat, you’ve got a lot of company. But I can also tell you, I know that when you’ve got just got pages and pages and pages of email streaming in your inbox, some marked unread, some flagged, some starred, most of them not, and you don’t know what is most important, that’s stress. I mean, I just think that’s the definition of stress, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. As you described that scene, I could actually feel my heart rate ticking up a bit. So, okay, less stress, fewer times, fewer total minutes there. Could you ballpark it for us? I mean, I’m sure it varies a lot based on roles and responsibilities and email volume. But in terms of untrained to email Jedi Master, what kind of email time savings might we realize?

Randall Dean
Well, it’s interesting. I had one of my university clients at one time, they had to sort of justify the expense of bringing me in to do the program. They did an ROI justification. And what they did was really cool. They actually asked people about a week or two after the program how much time they thought they were saving from the tips they learned in the program, and how confident they were, they were saving that much time.

And, now, the average person was basically saying they were saving more than two hours a week with a good number of them as much as four to six hours per week. Now, I know that may not sound like a lot, but if you could get a half day to three quarters of a day of additional productivity time every week, I think you’d be pretty happy with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And my mind just leaps to running the spreadsheet. So, two hours a week times 50 work weeks a year, 100 hours. What’s that annual rate for those employees? And now that time spent more valuably. So, Randall, unless your workshops cost a quarter million dollars, I’m pretty sure they got their money’s worth.

Randall Dean
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s easy, low-hanging fruit return on investment. I believe that we figured out that if you extrapolate those findings across all users in the room, that the first year ROI in and of itself was over 2,000%.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s what I like to hear.

Randall Dean
Because, like I said, it would be a different math if half the people or more already had this training, but if it’s literally 5% or less, it’s almost impossible not to see a significant productivity improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we’re fired up, Randy. Lay it on us, what do we do to realize these gains?

Randall Dean
Well, when I teach my programs, I’m mostly speaking to professionals using tools like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, and one of the first things you have to do is just understand how software works. Most people don’t know what the software can actually do. And one of my first tips to anybody is, if you’re using a piece of software frequently, daily, multiple hours per day, there may be no better use of your time if you want to be more efficient to spend a little bit of time at least every week learning another new tip.

Because, by learning that extra tip or two over time, you’re just going to get so much more efficient and so much more time back just by understanding how the software works.

And the one example, really interesting thing, because most people are self-taught, I’m going to play a scenario out for you that happens super frequently for a lot of people. They get an email, they open it, they read it far enough to go, “I don’t have time for this right now,” and then they mark it unread or they flag it or they star it. Okay, now right there, let me share with you the statistic that I believe comes from that behavior right there.

The average professional email user tends to look at each and every email they receive, on average, three to seven times before they finally take a smart action with that item. And I think a big part of the reason that’s happening is because they read it, they go, “I don’t have time,” they mark it unread, they flag it, they star it. It stays in the inbox. This is where your inbox mess is coming from too. And then what happens is you’ve just guaranteed you’ve got to go back and look at it again later.

And so, you’re not doing anything. I mean, you’re really not doing anything with that input, but you are giving it time that is basically worthless time that you’re throwing away. And so, one of the things that I share with the people is a little triage method, sort of based a little bit on the work of David Allen, who wrote the book Getting Things Done. I took training from him all the way back in the early ‘90s. And one of the things that I learned from him is, if something is quick, you do it right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Two-minute rule.

Randall Dean
Yeah. If it’s quick, you do it right now, and don’t you dare keep it for later. I love this. Somebody said, “Let’s go to Ohio. OHIO, only handle it once,” right? So, that should be your philosophy when you run into something quick. And I always challenge people in my programs, “If you’re looking at an email, you figure out what you need to do, and it’s only going to take you a couple minutes, and you don’t have time to do that? Why are you looking at your email? Shouldn’t you just keep working on what’s on fire? Why are you looking at your messages if you don’t have time to handle a quick little thing?” So, keep your focus.

But then, when I talked about what’s inside the software, both Outlook, classic Outlook, new Outlook, as well as Gmail have internal capabilities to take an email and quickly convert it into a related task or calendar item.

And so, I say take a few more seconds to get to the point where you know what you need to do next and then turn that item into a task or calendar item. And then once you’ve done that, if you haven’t got it done, but you got it on your task list or calendar, get it out of your inbox. Because, I mean, you’re done for now. It’s time to either file it for later reference or delete it if you don’t need it. And if you don’t have a good place to put it, make one and put it there. Not really rocket science.

I, sometimes, am surprised I get away with this as a living because, really, it’s sort of advanced common sense, but people just don’t think it all the way through, and they’re very inconsistent with how they’re triaging these messages.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, what’s interesting is, I think the reason you are getting away with it is because there’s some psychological things at play here.

Randall Dean

Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

Because whenever you go to the email, it’s like, “Ooh, here’s new interesting things. Oh, and some of it’s really important and urgent. I better handle it right away.” So, we’re almost never in the mind space like, “Okay, fire up Outlook, fire up Gmail. Hey, you know what? I wonder what all this software is capable of?” Like, we’re not in that headspace to do that.

And those functions, I guess, we’re not as accustomed to them, as well as thinking about the GTD, Getting Things Done, David Allen kind of philosophies of the inbox is merely a temporary repository by which it means, “Hey, you haven’t looked at me yet. Process me out of here in one way or another.” As opposed to, “Let me be the long-term storage facility for messaging.”

Randall Dean

Far too many people are using their inbox for three things. One is to receive and process new items. Two, is their de facto, but very dirty and highly disorganized task list. And, three, is their Uber storage for all things that haven’t left that inbox. And my strong belief, especially with my background understanding some of the GTD-type philosophies is the only one of those three that’s valid is processing new items. That’s what your inbox should be for is processing new items.

If you can deal with it quickly, you get it done. If you can’t deal with it quickly, it then becomes part of your task list or calendar because there, in your task list and calendar, once you understand those tools, you’ll be able to say, “What is the best use of my time right now? Where should I be putting my focus?” And you can’t really do that easily in a big messy cluttered inbox with 200 things marked unread and flagged. It’s just not going to work well.

And then, of course, once you’ve either got it done, got it on your task list, got it on your calendar, get it out of there. You don’t need it in there anymore.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. So, help us out, if we’re worried, like, “Okay, I read a message and I realize, hmm, this is going to take some more thought and attention, and it is not to be dealt with now. I’m not leaving it in my inbox. So, what am I doing with it? And how do I make sure I don’t forget about it and lose it if it’s not in my inbox?”

Randall Dean

Now, simultaneously, when I teach the tip about putting it especially into your task list, I also show in both programs how you can turn on reminders. And then, so what will happen is that task will pop back up on your screen at a time when it’s better for you to see it. Not the email, the task, although the email text is typically inside the task that’s been created.

And so, that way you can say, “Okay, I’ve identified what needs to be done. It’s going to come back and find me when I need to see it. I don’t need to leave it where I have it right now. I can put this thing away if I need to keep it for later, or get rid of it if I don’t need it.” And, I think, by utilizing the reminders that are available in both task and calendar, you can relieve some of that stress.

Of course, now I’m going to say this, I regularly get my inbox down to close to zero every day, which makes a lot of sense because I’m teaching people how to work their inbox. But because of that, what I’m trying to teach people is, once you get that inbox down to close to zero, that’s when you shift your focus to your task list and your calendar by habit.”

“If there’s nothing on my calendar right now, no meetings or blocked time for anything, then I work my task list until it’s time to go back and check my email again, or go to my next meeting.” And so, you just sort of get into this habit of where you’re surfing across those three tools throughout the day, balancing your needs to get your critical focused work done with your needs to periodically get back to people.

And I think if you can get yourself into that habit, that flow, you can both reduce the distraction of your email, reduce the time spent on your email, and potentially increase the time you’re spending on your more important stuff, which is the goal of all this anyway.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, let’s say we’ve scheduled a time, we’re going to spend 30 minutes or so processing this email, and just rocking through it. How do you recommend we execute this step by step? You mentioned triage.

Randall Dean

Yeah. Well, like I said, I think if you’re going to open an email, you look at it once. If you look at it, what do I need to do with it? If it’s quick, deal with it now. OHIO, only handle it once. If it’s not quick, it goes on to your task list or calendar, and then you either file it for later reference or you delete it. And if you don’t have a good place to file it, make one and put it there.

And I will say this, nobody’s perfect at this. I’m not perfect at this. But the closer I get to following that triage mentality when it comes to processing new inputs, especially at the start of the day, but maybe a few more times throughout the day, the more efficient I feel myself getting at dealing with this, once again, necessary nuisance, and keeping the squirrels under control.

So, that’s sort of the goal is, “I want to keep these squirrels from taking over. I want to be in control of this input stream.” And the way to be in control of that is by having a good consistent strategy, habit, routine on how you deal with them and try to stick as close to it as you possibly can.

How much time would you save over a year if you went from looking at the typical email three to seven times, down to once maybe twice max? How much time would that give you in a year?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it sounds like perhaps 100 plus hours.

Randall Dean

I would think so.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so you mentioned, learn the software. And I remember there was a day, and I was. I was just goofing around in Gmail, and I think in the settings, I saw enable shortcut keys.

Randall Dean

Yeah, yeah, I show that in my Gmail sessions. I actually go in the settings and I click on the link that says keyboard shortcuts. And, I mean, like that’s a classic example. It’s right there in your settings. You click on it, it opens up. It says shortcuts for computer, for Android, for iPad, right? And I’m like, “My gosh.” And then it’s got like 14 categories of ways you can use the shortcuts; each one is its own drop menu with a whole list of potential shortcuts.

And I tell people, I go in there and I show it, and I say, “Now look at this. This is a classic example. Print that. Print it onto a sheet of paper, set it right next to your computer, highlight two, three, four of these things that you want to get really good at, and then practice them for the next week or so. And then once you feel like you got those ones down, cross those out, highlight two, three, four more.

Once you get those done, then go back to the next drop panel and print that one and do the same thing. And if you just did that, picked up two, three of these keyboard shortcuts a week over the next year, you’d be like a maestro. I mean, you would be fantastic and so much more efficient at just doing the normal little stuff on your computer because now you don’t have to move your mouse to do it.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. When I made the discovery, I was astonished at so many levels. One, I thought, “How is it that these have been here the whole time and I was not aware?” Two, “Why were these not just automatically turned on as the default setting?” because I guess it was not at the time. Maybe it still is not. And, three, “How come none of my friends, who know I love productivity, ever felt the need to share this with me,” probably because they assumed I already knew it, and it would be insulting to bring it up to me.

Randall Dean

I’m going to give you a different assumption.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Randall Dean

They don’t know about them either, because nobody has the time to go take a look. That’s why I said, especially if you’re using Gmail, just in the last week, I saw two things that have changed. They’re constantly working on things behind the scenes. One of them was really minor. They moved it from the little three dots at the top of the screen to the little three dots over to the side of the screen.

And so, I was doing a live program, and I go where it’s always been, and I’m like, “Uh-oh, it’s not there anymore.” And then, just out of nature, I went over to the one, “Oh, there it is. They moved it.” And they’re doing that kind of stuff constantly. And so, I think when you’re using a tool like Gmail, as well as maybe the new and Web Outlook because those are sort of Cloud-based, real-time being updated type tools, you want to go in and look into your toolkit quite frequently because there’s new stuff showing up all the time.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s telling. And you’re right, and doesn’t take a lot of shortcut knowledge. The ones I use all the time is J for next message and E for archive message.  And you can do a lot of damage if you just say, that’s how I like to triage, I go, “What are the emails I can archive without even really reading? Like, I can just know these can disappear in under three seconds.”

And I go J-E, J-E, J-J-E, E, J-J-J. And it’s just like, boom, flying through it. And it does feel like you’re a maestro. It’s cool. Can you share with us, what are some other software discoveries that are eye-opening and game-changing for people?

Randall Dean

Well, I think one of the biggest ones that most people don’t realize, both Outlook and Gmail, you can actually utilize the Signatures tool as an automated response template manager. So, basically, like let’s say there are certain messages you’re sending all the time, and the same question keeps coming up over and over again. You go into your Sent folder to find the last time you sent it so you can forward it again until the next time you need to send it again.

And every time you’re doing that, you’re spending, I don’t know, a minute, two, three looking for this thing in your sent folder. You could just copy and paste the text of that message. Go into your Signatures tool in both Outlook and Gmail, create a new signature, give it a name, paste that text into the copy field with your signature at the bottom and hit OK. And now from this point forward, that message reply is push button.

So, as soon as somebody sends you the message, you just copy their email address, you go up to your signature, you pop that into the message, put their name in the Send field, personalize the “Hi, Joe” and then, boom, in like five seconds, you’re sending that message. Not two minutes. Five seconds. And so, that’s like a great example of a way that once you learn the way the software works and what it can do. I always tell people get the word signatures out of your head, replace it with automated email sender, and use that three to five times a day, that you just got half an hour right there.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, boy, there is so much we could cover. So, Randy, I’ll just leave it to you to curate. Could you give us maybe the top three transformational tips or practices in terms of this takes very few minutes but it will yield you very many hours?

Randall Dean

One of the things, and this is a little bit of a technical tip, so I’ll describe it, but it always gets the oohs and aahs when I’m doing my program. Did you know that you can just highlight a piece of text in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Docs? You can highlight it, release the click, then pick it up and move it to a different place.

And here’s the thing, it’s like almost like a shortcut to copy and paste, cut and paste. And the thing is that it works on all of these tools – Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, Google Slides, even on a lot of web forms it works. And if you can get really good at this, it’s like this quick little thing that you can do to allow you to take a piece of information that’s in the wrong place in your document or file, and quickly move it to the right place in your document or file.

And little tips like that, I think, can, you know, I will say, you know, when I show that to people and they’re all going like, “I didn’t know that I could do that.” I go, “Ah, I just gave you three days this year. There’s your three days.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, I guess we’re saving the Command X and the Command V steps in doing that. Okay.

Randall Dean

And, I mean, it’s literally going to save you a second or two every time, but that second or two, multiplied by 40,000 times a year, it’s going to add up. The other one that I love is that a lot of people don’t realize this. When you’re creating folders, that you can use a special character, like an exclamation point, or even a number, and that will allow your folders to supersede alphabetization. So, what you can do is identify the folders you use the most or that are most important, and move them to the top of your folders list.

And that’s another one that is just like a no-brainer, super time saver, because now, instead of having to go all the way through the alphabet, you’re truncating that, and you can get to the folders you use most frequently right there at the top of your list. And that works not just in your email. It works in both Outlook and Gmail, but it also works in tools like OneDrive and Google Drive with your folders for your documents and files. You can actually move up your most used folders to the top and save a ton of time there, too.

Pete Mockaitis

Nifty. Okay. What else have you got?

Randall Dean

The other one that I really love is to get into the settings, you might need to go into rules in Outlook. You can also do this in New Outlook. You might have to go into Settings, Mail, Notifications. So, they’ve sort of moved it just a little bit. And in Gmail, you might have to go in and set up a filter to do this to make it all work.

But the basic tip is this, identify who your most important senders are. You know how I talked about the big angry dog? You want to identify, “Who sends me emails that are my big angry dogs?” Because what you can do in these tools is you can then go in and tell Outlook and Gmail, “These are my most important people. So, when they send me a message, I would like a pop-up or I would like a unique sound.”

And that means that you don’t necessarily have to get distracted by every squirrel, but when it’s one of those most important people, you certainly can. You can be, “Okay, boom! You know what? I’ll make a different sound, ‘Dun-da-dun-dun’ instead of ‘Doo-doo-doo-doon,’” you’ve been here for years and years, you’ll hear the “Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” “Oh, I got to stop for a second, I got to see what this one is.”

And so, that way you don’t feel like you have to look at everything coming in right now because you know that the really important things are going to probably jump up and get you, which means that actually, you might feel a little bit more comfortable keeping your focus on things, knowing that it’s going to tell you when the big angry dogs bark.

And I’ll even add one little micro thing about this. That same capability of setting up those rules can also allow you to set rules to auto-delete things that you don’t want to see at all. So, not only can it help you know when your most important people are trying to get a hold of you. It can also get rid of a bunch of the junk and spam automatically so it’s not even taking two seconds of your time.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool.

Randall Dean

So, it’s both sides. It helps on both sides of this. One last thing I’ll say is Outlook, specifically, will even allow you to set a priority level. So, like, I want to know when I get an email from my boss that is marked important. See, and it will only make the special sound when it’s from my boss marked important.

In that way if you’ve got an enlightened boss, who’s also taken my program, they’re going to learn that they should only mark emails important when they want faster action. Everything else can just be processed in normal strategy. And I always make the joke, “If every email you send is marked urgent or important, none of your emails are truly urgent or important.”

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. Well, tell me, Randy, any final things you want to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Randall Dean

Once you get this efficiency regained, then you can actually take advantage of some of the other tools in in the suite – calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, maybe tools like OneNote or Google Keep, Teams, Drive, Planner – to get significantly more prioritized and strategic with that extra time you’ve now created.

And if you can get to where, you know, you get that email under control, it’s not taking quite as much of your day, you’re getting some of these efficiencies in time, then maybe you can actually step your game up to be a little bit more prioritized, more strategic, more effective, because now you’ve got this new necessary nuisance under control a bit.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Randall Dean

Well, it’s funny. I put it in my book. The quote is from Gandhi. It’s, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” But I then put right under it, “Be the change you wish to see in your inbox.” 

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Randall Dean

It’s more than 20 years old now, it was by the group called Basics. And they actually did a study where they got permission to go into a whole bunch of different organizations, have their researchers stand around just waiting and watching for people getting unexpectedly interrupted, and they tracked what happened.

And they found an interesting thing, that people that get unexpectedly interrupted in the workplace, after that interruption has been handled, they answered the question, they had the conversation, they get off the phone call. The interruption is now over. If they’re not ready for that interruption when it first occurred, they will then spend an additional four to 15 minutes each and every time before they get back to what they were working on, because they lost their place and they forgot what they were doing.

And so, the little micro tip that I share is, if somebody interrupts you, you can just go, “One second, please,” grab a sticky note and write down exactly what it is you need to do next on whatever you’re working on, put that right on your computer screen. And the goal of that is so that you’re basically leaving yourself bookmarks throughout the day, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I was doing.”

So, the interruptions can still happen, and I even say, I think it will help your communication quality because if you don’t do that, what are you very often doing the whole time you’re talking to that person?

Pete Mockaitis

To remember you’re still doing the thing, yeah.

Randall Dean

Trying to remember where you’re at, which means what are you not doing, listening? And that is where mistakes and errors of omission creep in, too. So, I think that’s just a classic little study that can then morph into it. And I always conflate that, you know, four to fifteen minutes per, and then I will ask my audience, I’ll go, “What do you think, 10 to 25 a day, 10 to 25 unexpected phone calls, stop-bys, interruptions, text messages?” And people give me the head nod.

I go, “If I’m right on this, that means you’re losing 45 minutes to as much as two hours a day just because you’re getting distracted that many times per day. And if you can get it down to where you have a strategy for that, that could create another hour or two, daily.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. And a favorite book?

Randall Dean

It’s called Clutter’s Last Stand by Don Aslett.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Randall Dean

Don’t start your day in your inbox. Start your day in your calendar for a few minutes. Not just looking at today, but looking forward to see if there’s anything coming you need to get ready for. Are there any blocks of time that you could block for more strategic use on your key projects or activities? And then build a short, focused task list for today that matches your key projects and responsibilities, but also your available time.

If you’re doing that right, that should only take you three to five minutes at the start of the day. But you want to do that before you even dare open your inbox. Because if you open your inbox first, it’s basically like going over the door of the office, opening the door, and saying, “Come on in, squirrels! Take over,” right?

So, I want you to get into your time, your projects, and your tasks for a few minutes before opening your email so that you put that email into perspective. And then if the email fully takes over, it probably should. It probably is the most important thing. But if you’re not looking at your calendar and your projects and tasks first, how do you know? You’re just guessing.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Randall Dean

I would just say go out and check out my website, RandallDean.com, pretty easy. That’s Randall, R-A-N-D-A-L-L. And if you go out to RandallDean.com, I’m also on LinkedIn. I would say search “Randy Dean” to find me. And I have a popular and growing YouTube channel too, and I think you could just type in Randy Dean, email, and it’ll probably, something of mine’s going to pop up right near the top of the list, so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Randall Dean

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Pick two, three, four pieces of low-hanging fruit, do those first, baby steps. You don’t have to become an expert overnight, but find those really good nuggets wherever you find them and try to integrate those right away, and then build your system from there.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Randy, this is fun. Thank you.

Randall Dean

Yeah, I had a good time.