How To Go Dark Without Missing Urgent Email

By Tim on March 15, 2009 in GTD

: Image via CrunchBase

Making email your servant rather than your master has become a crucial skill in the productivity stakes, especially in a web culture of being continually available to friends, followers, family, clients etc. by email, Twitter, Blackberry etc. Very occasionally, we need to be completely free of distractions in order to knuckle down, put the blinkers on and focus on a single task.

This always raises the question of what we do with our inbox? Do we ignore it? Let it accumulate a few dozen/hundred emails ready for our return? This often proves to be a distraction, a temptation to check.

Do we delete all emails on arrival? What if something urgent comes in?

GMail offers us a nice way out of the quandary. Depending on what you use a particular email address for, here’s one way of nicely going dark without missing important emails: (note, let’s assume our email address is bob@gmail.com)

Set an Out-of-Office reply. It’s important that the text in the reply is appropriate for your particular uses. There’s also an important aspect to the reply – the way to contact you with an urgent matter.

“Please note that due to an important commitment, I will be unavailable from Sunday 15th March to Tuesday 17th March inclusive. As such, your email message has not been delivered. To get in touch with me, please resend your email at any point from Wednesday 18th March onwards.

If your message is urgent, please resend it now to bob+urgent@gmail.com

Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Regards,

Bob”

Setting an out of office reply

A few of key points:

We’re making it clear that we’ve gone dark because of an important commitment, not because we’re going on a 3 day drinking binge in Amsterdam.
We’re giving specific dates that we will be out of contact for.
We’re making it clear that the message has not been delivered and should be resent at a later date if it’s important.
We’re offering a way for people to be pushy if something really is urgent. The fact that they are given this opportunity will dissuade folks from bugging you with every little thing, but people in real urgent need can contact you. The ‘+urgent’ part of the email address is a nifty feature, and will be delivered to you as normal.

Set up “tunnel vision” filter. Add a filter to your account so that any mail not addressed to bob+urgent@gmail.com is deleted.

Adding the filter

Delete it

This helps us stop the inbox count leaving zero unless there’s a a genuinely urgent message. All incoming emails will be deleted unless they’re sent to bob+urgent@gmail.com. When we’re back in contact, just remember to turn off the filter and Out-of-Office reply!

What do you do with your email when you’re trying to focus on a task? What could we do to improve this GMail hack?