Four Faculty-Focused Email Tips

Emails suck. As a faculty member I have to spend large parts of my day responding to emails, to serve what Cal Newport calls "the hyperactive hivemind" where decisions are made by this constant back and forth of emails. Faculty can't eliminate emails completely, but I have found a few things to help me manage my email load, which could help others.

Two precautions: 

1. Each of our email systems are different, yet most will have a version of what I am suggesting. I use Outlook for my work email, and I am confident that these ideas could work for you in Gmail, Mail on Mac, etc. 

2. Just as our email systems are different, you may use a different learning management system (LMS) than what my institution uses, Canvas. This is not a big deal as most (Moodle, Blackboard, etc.) have settings similar to what I use. 

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, here are four tips to reduce how much time, effort, and energy you spend on emails as a faculty member. 

1. Filter emails

While this isn't a new idea, I use it to help me reduce cognitive switching, the idea that your cognitive abilities decline when you switch between multiple contexts. For a faculty member your different contexts could be teaching a 100-level survey course, a majors course, the two to three committees you are on, and your work with colleagues. If you read your emails in chronological order, you're likely going back and forth between these different contexts, potentially reducing your ability to respond to these messages, or overtaxing your brain.

At the start of each term I create an email folder for each class. I set my LMS to send messages within the LMS to my email, which I can then respond to in my email system. (I clean out my LMS inbox once a week as a check to see if I have responded to all student messages.) With this setup the LMS will add course information into the header, which I can create filters for after a couple students send me messages in the LMS. These filters send student emails from each course to the course-specific folder. When I'm ready to respond to those student emails, I can read and respond to all the emails from one class. This also helps see if issues are course-wide (multiple students emailing me about the same thing), or just an individual issue. 

If your LMS doesn't forward messages like this, maybe you have multiple filters for a class folder, where each filter is for each student's email address. Maybe your filters are based on a specific word or phrase you ask students to include in emails, ex. "SOC 16500". Maybe your filter is focused on all emails where you are Bcced so you can read those campus wide emails at the end of the week. I'm not you, I'm not going to know the exact filters you will need to create so emails about your various contexts will go into individual folders, you are. Through testing, experimentation, and playing with your email program's filters, you can separate your email into discrete groups, to manage that onslaught of emails you get each day. 

Filter settings for Outlook: Use Outlook's built-in search filters

Filter settings for Gmail: Advanced Gmail filters for work or school

Filter settings for Mail for Mac: Filter emails in Mail on Mac

2. Reply All by Meeting

This one doesn't take as much setup and time as the first suggestion, but it can reduce the number of emails you get, a laudable goal for any faculty member. If you feel a short synchronous conversation would avoid more emails, set the meeting. For the love of all that is holy, setup a quick meeting over Zoom/Teams/Meet/Whatever and get it hashed out. No one will be annoyed at having this meeting, and if they are, don't invite them to happy hour.

I acknowledge there is a hidden assumption here: everyone's calendars are up-to-date. This can be a tall order, but even if someone doesn't use the calendar you have access to, this starts the ball rolling with a specific meeting invite. Two to four emails to figure out a time to meet is better than the ten to twenty spread out over a week needed to resolve the issue. 

Reply All by Meeting for Outlook: Respond to an email message with a meeting request

Gmail doesn't have a Reply All by Meeting setting on its own, however there are a few plug-ins and apps that can add this function: Boomerang, Reply, and others. 

Reply All by Meeting for Mail for Mac: From Lifewire: Create a Calendar Event From an Email in Mac OS X Mail

3. Reply All by Meeting for Yourself

With this suggestion I am assuming your online calendar is up-to-date, so if it isn't go do that now.... As I was saying, while Reply All by Meeting is helpful when dealing with other people, it can also be helpful when you need to set aside time to respond to a long email. Click on Reply All by Meeting, delete everyone else's email address from the invite, find a time that works for you, and make it private. This allows you to set aside a time to write that long response, doing the additional research as needed, talking to others for info, etc. You also get some peace and quiet because no one can schedule you during this time without seeming like a jerk. 

4. Snooze

No, this isn't like your phone alarm where you have alarms with increasingly dire names as they get closer to 7:30 AM. This is strategically ignoring emails until you have the bandwidth to deal with them. At its most simple you can choose to Snooze an email for a day, a week, or for any length of time. Until then that email will disappear from your inbox (not deleted or archived, but still searchable) and will pop up at the day and time you set. This is great if you are trying to get to inbox zero and don't have the 15 minutes you need to answer someone's not urgent, not important question. 

The next level of using Snooze is to set a day and time when a connected event will start or end. A simple example: I know that tomorrow I am going to have a lot of meetings and I won't be able to respond to this email until 3:00 PM. I set the Snooze for the email until then and it is out of my hair until after my meetings when I have time to respond. A more advanced example is that I won't have an answer to someone's email until after a meeting, workshop, or some other event. I can then Snooze that email until after the event and respond when I have the information. 

Snooze for Outlook: Snooze an email message with Outlook. 

Snooze for Gmail: Snooze emails until later

I can't seem to find settings for snooze for Mail for Mac, however there are a few plug-ins and apps that can add this function: Mailbutler, SmallCubed, etc. 

None of the above is going to reduce your email time to zero, but I am hoping that these suggestions could help you reduce the amount of time or energy you spend on emails. With all productivity suggestions the only thing that really works is for us to test out different ideas, reflect on what works and what doesn't for us, and iterate. No one has magic beans to sell you, but you can grow them yourself.