Email GTD

The goal of the system is that the vast majority of emails don't get to you, because they don't need to.

You should only be responding to the very few emails per day that are important for you to take action on, and everything else should go to the relevant person.

To do that, everything needs to have a clear "place" it should go. The classic Getting Things Done flowchart is a helpful analogy here:

You can use this flowchart to create all your email SOPs so that someone else can handle all your email for you.

Is It Actionable?

This is the first question for every email that you need rules for handling. A few of mine:

If it's a marketing email, archive or unsubscribe

If it's a cold email, archive it

If it's a newsletter I'm subscribed to, open it in the browser and save it to my Instapaper. This way I can still read the newsletters I love without having to do it in my email.

If it's something I'm CC'd on that requires nothing from me, archive.

Why immediately archive every cold email? I get a ton of cold emails now between Growth Machine & Nateliason.com, and I can't review all of them. Archiving them is a great way to filter who actually follows up and who doesn't. If someone follows up two or three times and it looks like something I might be interested in, then Amanda will pass it on to me.

Assuming an email passes through all those checks, the next question is:

If It’s Actionable, What's the Next Action?

This is where it helps to make lots of little rules and guidelines depending on the types of emails you get.

For example, every now and then someone wants a refund on effortlessoutput.com. As a policy I rarely ask questions, I just refund them, so the next action whenever a refund request comes in is to just refund them. We made an SOP for this, and now those emails have an automatic next action:

You want to create as many automatic next actions as possible to minimize the amount of time you spend in email. Here are a few more of mine:

If they're asking about working with Growth Machine, intro them to Growth Machine's head of sales Nathan.

If they want to have me on a podcast or something for anything marketing / SEO related, intro them to Growth Machine's head of marketing Amanda.

If it's a Medley testimonial, thank them and add it to the site.

If it's a suggestion for something to read for a future Medley, add it to my Roam database with the #Recommendations tag and their name.

If it's a follow up about a meeting, go ahead and schedule the meeting.

If it's a question about Effortless Output answer it from the saved answers we have, or direct them to the forum.

If it's a student emailing from an EDU email and they want the student discount, give it to them.

If it's an invoice for Growth Machine, pass it to our accounting team. If it's an invoice for me, verify, then pay it.

These rules naturally emerge as whoever you're working with takes on more and more of your email and asks questions. Whenever possible, find ways to create rules to address things so they take the minimal amount of energy from both of you. I suspect Amanda has a bunch of other rules she's come up with that I don't even know about.

Many of my rules relate to other people who work at Growth Machine, but you don’t have to have a team to make rules like this. Your rules will just be different, and you’ll have to make different filters for how to handle everything.

Finally, on to me

Anything that hasn't already been filtered out by one of the rules eventually makes it to me, which is typically 2-5 emails a day.

We also of course have rules for what should automatically go to me, even if it fails some of the other tests:

Anything from my family goes to me

Anything from one of my Growth Machine clients goes to me

Anything from a friend goes on to me

She sends the relevant emails in the slack message you saw above twice a day, I process them, and email is handled!

Nat Eliason • How I Spend 5 Minutes Per Day on Email