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Email is a primary communication tool in most healthcare organizations, and many nurse leaders receive huge amounts of email. Nurse leaders must maintain responsiveness without becoming a slave to email. I unpack 3 actionable strategies to redefine your relationship with email:

1. Turn off new message notifications – replace paranoid checking with disciplined daily processing
2. Negotiate new communication expectations – work with colleagues and direct reports to use more effective methods for urgent communication instead of email.
3. Install structure around your email – create habits of scheduled email processing, coupled with emergency scanning when necessary. Move more communication into robust, synchronous conversation and rely less on email.

What’s the current situation in your email inbox? Is your unread count in the dozens? hundreds? thousands? You didn’t become a nurse leader so you could read and write more emails. Neither did I. Nevertheless, most of us receive a mind-boggling volume of emails each day, to the point that it can feel like your job is actually just emails. Let’s dive into some email tips for nurse leaders to take back control.

Why does email matter to nurse leaders?

On the flip side of becoming consumed with managing email, it’s easy to dismiss email wholesale as an “unimportant” activity. That would be a mistake. Unfortunately, many organizations rely heavily on email for communication, making this a necessary task for leaders to manage effectively.

Maintaining a reasonable standard of responsiveness is also critical for building trust. If you are unreachable or inconsistent in your responsiveness, colleagues may question your reliability. Poor response times also tend to generate dysfunctional and unhealthy communication patterns as people devise increasingly elaborate workarounds to get your attention.

Part of the challenge is that email contains communication of varying degrees of importance and urgency, and there is no way to know which messages fall into which categories until you read or at least skim them. So, we have to keep some level of daily engagement with email while protecting their time and attention for more strategic activities. Therefore, we need to be intentional about the way we engage with email.

The good news is that these are skills that can be practiced and learned. The bad news is that for the most part you will need to teach yourself. Most organizations set few standards and provide virtually no training for this level of mundane work management and leave it up to each individual to develop effective habits. But first, you should have an idea of your starting point.

Assessing your relationship with email

Your first task is to figure out where your relationship with email has gone toxic. See if you agree with the following statements:

• I rarely if ever check work email off-hours at home, or while on vacation
• I can pay full attention in an in-person meeting without looking at my email either on a computer or my phone
• I dont feel the need to use zoom meetings to read emails
• I respond to messages within 24 to 48 hours
• My inbox gets emptied at least a few times a week, if not every day
• When I need to return to an actionable email, I can find it quickly without hunting through my inbox

If these statements sound too good to be true, you may have a toxic relationship with your email. Email is abusing you. It is demanding your attention when it doesn’t deserve it, dominating and controlling your time and attention, and insisting that you respond to its every beck and call. This is not healthy, nor is it productive for you as a leader.

To fix this, hone in on the statements above that resonate the most, or sound most attractive. Do you find yourself constantly interrupted and your focus disturbed by email notifications during meetings, off-hours, or even family events? Do you just wish you could find old emails more quickly? Are you finding that people are sending you multiple emails, text messages, voicemails, and calls because they can’t get a response from you? These may be good areas to start setting new boundaries and redefining your relationship with email.

Tips to tame your email aS A NURSE LEADER

Despite it’s mundane nature, this topic is surprisingly complex. I could (and probably will) write numerous posts on this topic and still have plenty to discuss. Here, I will lay out three foundational strategies you can take to start getting traction today on redefining your relationship with email. These are a sound starting point to a journey of building intentional habits around the quagmire of digital communication.

Turn off notifications for new emails

I know this gives you anxiety, but trust me, this step by itself changes the game. But what if you miss something really important?!

The reality is that the vast majority of email communications do not require immediate attention, and the ones that do are being mismanaged (See strategy #2).

In exchange for the exceedingly small risk of a delayed response to something urgent, you will gain a tremendous boost in your ability to focus. You’ll more readily engage in difficult cognitive work and interacting with others without distraction. This is a good tradeoff. You will move from your email constantly beckoning you back to the digital slot-machine of your inbox, to being in control of when and where you engage with email. That is a huge step toward a healthier relationship. Implementing the second strategy will mitigate and perhaps even eliminate the risk of this strategy altogether.

Negotiate NEW communication expectations

Email is not a good medium for all types of communication. In fact, it’s pretty bad for a lot of things. Unfortunately, its ubiquity in organizations often means email is the default, reflexive mode for all communication. That kind of environment breeds toxic email relationships. The good news is that most of this behavior is unconscious and reflexive, so with a few intentional steps, you can start to build a personal bubble of sanity amid the chaos.

The key is to intentionally set expectations with your direct reports, colleagues, and superiors about how communication will happen, and stick to them. Having agreed-upon protocols and response times is a great practice. The goal is to move urgent and time-sensitive communication out of email, so that you can stop compulsively checking and build more intentional habits.

For example, all of my direct reports know that if they need my immediate attention and response, they must call my cell phone. We also have agreed to a protocol for situations where answering the phone is not feasible: the recipient texts the caller with an ETA of when they’ll be available, and the caller texts the recipient with a one-line explanation for the reason for calling.

The benefit here is twofold – 1) I know if they are calling me, its urgent, and 2) they know how to get my attention if its necessary. We have similar protocols based on the timeframe a response is needed, who is involved (internal/within team, or including external parties), and the content of the message. The guidelines are simple and fit on one page. Importantly, all these protocols are two-way agreements: I follow the same procedures with my staff as I expect them to follow with me. The resulting clarity of expectations and reliability in communication is hard to overstate.

This is admittedly easier with your direct reports since you (presumably) have the authority to set expectations. Though I recommend approaching this as an inquisitive dialogue since it gives staff opportunity for input and ownership of the new standards.

In discussing these agreements with peers, approach them positively. Rather than tell your colleagues what you’re not going to do (“I don’t check email often, so don’t expect me to respond urgently”), introduce how you’d like them to handle things to get a response (“if you call my cell, I will know it’s urgent and pick up or call back right away”). A similar approach is advisable with your superiors, though you may need to frame it as a request and explore their expectations more openly before settling on an agreed process. With everyone, emphasize that your goal is to be more responsive and available, not to erect barriers to communication. In all cases, consider documenting the agreement somewhere in writing (an informal email is fine for most), gently nudge people back to the agreed process when they stray into the wrong medium, and do your best to follow the agreed process yourself.

Once you’ve killed new message notifications and begun negotiating new expectations around communication, you can begin working on the third strategy to tame your email.

Install structure around your email

With notifications off and new expectations around communication, you’ve begun creating new boundaries for email in your professional life. However, none of that will matter without intentional, consistent habits for handling email. The next goal will be to move away from the haphazard, reactive engagement with email that most professionals rely on to a more systematic, structured approach that puts you in control. Here are three strategies to get you started:

Process email at specific times, and ignore it otherwise

Now that notifications aren’t constantly screaming at you to go look at the latest email, you have the freedom to set aside specific times to deal with email. You might be thinking you should set up a recurring appointment in your calendar for the same time every day to run through all your emails; I know it’s tempting but that would be a mistake. The reality for most leaders is far too unpredictable; instead I suggest scheduling your email blocks either first thing in the morning or the prior evening before leaving work, based on the time you have available. This allows more flexibility, and helps you have realistic expectations about how responsive you can be on any given day.

Don’t underestimate how much time you will need for email. I find that i personally need about 90 minutes to 2 hours, cumulatively throughout the day, to keep up with emails. That may sound like a lot, but ask yourself – were you really conscious to how much time you were spending on email before? At least now you’ll know. I suggest starting with blocking out 2 hours in 30-minute chunks throughout the day and dialing it back if you find you consistently need less time. In a future post, I’ll cover strategies for preventing every minute of your day from being packed with meetings, which can be a real barrier to responsiveness.

Differentiate between emergency scanning and processing email

Given your new, structured approach to email, you will need at least two different “modes” in which to address email. Sometimes you will not have sufficient time or mental clarity to thoroughly process and respond to emails, but you may still need to check for hot button issues that need your attention (especially if you are still working on negotiating new communication expectations from strategy # 2). I suggest thinking about “emergency scanning” versus “processing” as two separate procedures that you’ll use at different times. This is an idea I picked up from David Allen’s book Gettign Things Done.

Emergency Scanning

Emergency scanning is exactly what it sounds like. You quickly scan through your inbox to see if there are any messages that need your attention now, and if so, you deal with them right away. If not, you move on to other things. This is a quick process – 30 seconds to 2 minutes tops. I often will do this in odd windows between meetings and rely on it heavily when my day is packed with appointments with little discretionary time. The key success factor here is to be disciplined about what earns your attention. If its truly not urgent, ignore it. You will get to it when you do a thorough processing in one of your scheduled email blocks

Processing email

Processing is when you truly engage with email. I suggest doing this with minimal distraction because you will find it can be surprisingly cognitively taxing. Read each message one at a time, decide how to handle it, and capture that action in your to do list(s), you dont need to do it now, but keep track of it. You will likely reply to most messages at least acknowledging what needs to be done and closing the loop with the sender. I suggest making a habit of actually emptying your inbox – move the messages you’ve read and dealt with into folders so that your inbox only contains the new and unaddressed things. This approach is thoroughly detailed in David Allen’s book Getting things done: the art of stress free productivity which I highly recommend to everyone. Fair warning: this approach is counterintuitive to most people and will take lots of practice. However, I promise it will transform your relationship with email and put you in relaxed control, if you stick with it.

Rely less on email

Once you have more disciplined and structured email habits, you will begin to notice everyone else’s over-reliance on email more readily. Help them out by moving more of your conversations out of email and into robust synchronous communication.
Get comfortable with sending responses like:

• You made some good points, I’d love to discuss this – can we connect for a quick call?
• It sounds like we still have decisions to make, when can everyone be available for a quick zoom call?
• I agree, lets connect and talk about this
• I’m not sure I understand this fully, and I’d love to hear your perspective – when can we talk?

Try to make this your reflex whenever the conversation is more complex than a quick transactional exchange (deliver a document, answer a simple question, provide information, etc.). Most people will be amenable to making real-time communication happen, after all they are likely just reflexively sending emails because that’s what they’ve always done.
You will find this enhances the quality of the communication while simultaneously reducing the volume of emails you receive – a win-win. If you want more strategies like this, I highly recommend Cal Newport’s book A World Without Email.

Playing the long game

As I wrote earlier, this is a monstrous topic. I’ve already more than doubled my typical word count in this post, and only scratched the surface of effective email management. Rest assured, I will revisit this topic in the future with additional tips, but these will get you started on reclaiming your time and attention from the ever-expanding quagmire of email.
For a quick recap:

• Turn off new message notifications – you wont need them because you will replace paranoid checking with disciplined daily processing
• Negotiate new communication expectations – work with colleagues and direct reports to use more effective methods for urgent communication instead of email.
• Install structure around your email – create habits of scheduled email processing, coupled with emergency scanning when necessary. Dont check email otherwise. Move more of your communication into synchronous, robust conversation instead of relying on email.

It can take months or even years to fully change your habits around email, but over time it will work like compound interest in exponentially improving your ability to balance responsiveness with managing your attention and focus.