Managing partner Pete Woodward suggests ways of overcoming ‘email inbox misery’ so you can reclaim some time to focus on the bigger strategic issues
Like many practice managers, I receive a lot of emails.
And I started to feel at risk of getting overwhelmed by a constant onslaught of information and ‘can you just..?’ requests, without any of it actually helping my practice to perform better for our patients.
Thinking about the things we do that make an impact, in reality, hardly any of them happen over email. It’s the real-life interactions we have with our teams and patients that make the biggest difference, not reminders to complete online forms, tedious stock counts or email discussions about the biscuit budget.
Using techniques from across different industries, and drawing on two books I highly recommend, Slow Productivity by Cal Newport and Productivity Ninja by Graham Allcott, I have been able to dramatically reduce the amount of time I spend answering emails, giving me more headspace for the things that matter.
Here’s how I did it.
Accept that you can’t do everything
An easy trap to fall into is prescribing equal weight to all emails we receive. We’re bombarded by communications every day that have limited relevance to our goals. For each email, ask yourself the question ‘does this help me meet the long-term goals of the practice?’. If not, my advice is to spend as little time as possible dealing with it.
This can be difficult, but just think carefully about what you’re trying to achieve. Practice strategy usually revolves around goals like improving patient experience and staff satisfaction. Do reminders to complete National Workforce Returns achieve that, or does getting involved in every tiny issue about a broken printer?
Of course not! It’s the real-life work that you and your teams do in the practice that affects patient experience and satisfaction, not filling in forms and minutiae.
The forms may be contractual, but they’re unlikely to be important in the context of meeting your strategy, and they contribute to the mass of emails that make it difficult to focus on the things that really matter.
Change your folder organisation
One of the biggest mistakes I used to make was creating lots of folders in my inbox, for all kinds of things. For example – a folder for the PCN, another for the ICB, one for premises issues, and so on.
But this approach only makes it harder to find the relevant information or email needed. Issues and subjects often fit under multiple categories, and with a long list of folders to choose from, it means you spend longer deciding what which category or group of categories an email belongs in.
Reducing the number of folders in my inbox has helped me simplify. To retrieve an old email, the search function in Microsoft Outlook is powerful – you can filter by senders, subject lines, whether the email has an attachment and so on. I’d say that 99% of the time this is effective in helping me to access old email within seconds.
Having said that, we do need some folders to manage emails more efficiently. I recommend the following, so all the emails you deal with should fall into one of these categories:
- Action Required – for things I need to work on (whether urgent or not – I only think about urgency when working through this folder, rather than when sifting my inbox). The purpose of the folder is to be the ‘go-to’ folder that you spend most of the time working from.
- Awaiting Response – for issues where someone else is responsible for the next action, but I want to monitor what happens. I usually work through this folder once a week.
- Archive – for everything that needs no further action, or where it doesn’t matter what happens next, so I don’t need to follow it up. Some of these emails could also be deleted – however archiving means that I’m still able to use the ‘search’ function to find things in the future. Ultimately, this folder should rarely be looked at if possible! And it’s fine if emails that could have been deleted find themselves in this folder. The point is not to waste time on the thought process and removing the ‘archive or delete’ decision is usually helpful, as I think people disproportionately struggle with it.
- Ideas – for everything that I’m going to do ‘one day when I get a free minute’. (Even with this new email system, I confess, working through the ideas folder doesn’t happen very often!)
Processing emails more efficiently
Don’t think of your inbox as a to do list! It’s simply a place where information gathers and needs to be processed.
For each email, consider whether:
- Is there an action for me? If so, and it’ll take less than two minutes, do it now. If I will take longer, put it in ‘Action Required’ folder.
- Is there an action for someone else? If so, and you care about the outcome, put it in ‘Awaiting response’ folder. If you don’t care, put it in Archive.
- To check emails that fall into the ‘Awaiting response’ category, on a particular date in the future, set a flag or calendar reminder.
You may be reading this and thinking, ‘But I’ve got 12,452 e-mails in my inbox, that’ll take forever! Here are some techniques to cut down on a creaking inbox quickly:
- Take all emails older than three months and put them into the Archive folder (for Outlook users, click the top email, scroll to the end, hold shift and click the bottom one, then you can batch move them). The worst that can happen is that someone sends you another email, chasing you up.
- Sort your inbox by subject. This will bring all the chains together. Move everything except the top email to the archive (as the top one will contain the information from the whole chain).
- Sort your inbox by name. Remove emails from people who are no longer in post.
- There should be relatively few left, go through these one by one and sift into your new folders.
- Anything that you can unsubscribe from, do it! Does that Wagamama newsletter really need to be there, clogging up your inbox?
Another great tip is to turn off email notifications. It takes an average of five minutes to get back to what you were doing following a distraction, and constant ‘pings’ on the computer make it impossible to concentrate.
Use inbox rules and auto-forwarding
Even by just following the above points can be transformational and should make a massive difference to most practice managers. But setting up inbox rules can further boost email management performance. Inbox rules search for a particular sender, or subject line, or text, and are set up to automatically take a particular action with that email.
For example, controlled drug alerts can automatically be forward to your pharmacist, then file themselves into your archive folder.
Or emails related to the Data Protection Toolkit, that I don’t need since I already have an annual reminder set on my calendar, can be automatically filed straight into the archive or delete folder.
To set up an inbox rule in Outlook see here. For NHSMail, see here.
I have put auto-forwarding to great use by creating a generic inbox, that is accessible by numerous members of my team. So, any emails sent to me from an external source are automatically re-routed to that inbox, and one of my team sifts through them all, then presents me with a ‘daily digest’ of the items relevant to me.
This has freed up around an hour of my day.
Lastly, one of the best recommendations is to turn your email completely off occasionally! It doesn’t matter if it takes a few hours longer to reply to most emails, if it’s that urgent, the person trying to contact you will probably phone you anyway.
Besides, everyone knows you’re busy – you’re a practice manager!
Pete Woodward is managing partner at Cheadle Medical Practice and Alvanley Family Practice in Stockport, as well as running Woodley Village Surgery on a consultancy basis. He is Non-Executive Director at Viaduct Care (Stockport’s GP Federation), and runs The Human Touch, a consultancy providing practices with financial and operational guidance, as well as supporting practices implement total triage. Pete won the Practice Manager of the Year award in 2024.
