There are a few things many of us do all day, every day. They include:
If you were to get faster at doing any of these things, what would you be able to focus on with the extra time? What’s that worth to you?
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Let’s say there’s been a massive traffic accident on a highway near you. Within minutes, the emergency room reception area of the nearest major hospital is packed with over 100 victims, all in varying states of need, all expecting to receive near-immediate attention. The emergency room nurses spring into action.
Question: What’s the first thing they do?
Answer: They apply a process called triage.
Definition: Triage is the sorting of, and allocation of, treatment to patients, especially battle and disaster victims, according to a proven system of priorities designed to maximise the number of survivors.
Application: What’s this got to do with email? It’s a near-perfect metaphor, actually. Read on to see how a triage approach to managing your inbox will add hours to your week and minimise email stress.
The word triage comes from the French verb trier, meaning to separate, sort, sift or select. The triage process used by emergency room staffers is designed to simplify decision making. A colour-coded tag is used to identify the next actions to be taken as follows:
Black: Deceased/Expectant
Patients are so severely injured that they will die of their injuries, possibly in hours or days; they should be taken to a holding area and given painkillers as required to reduce suffering.
Red: Immediate/Life Threatening
Patients require immediate surgery or other life-saving intervention, and have first priority for surgical teams or transport to advanced facilities; they “cannot wait” but are likely to survive with immediate treatment.
Yellow: Delayed/ Observation
Patients’ condition is stable for the moment but requires watching by trained persons and frequent re-triage, will need hospital care (and would receive immediate priority care under “normal” circumstances).
Green: Minor/Wait
Patients will require a doctor’s care in several hours or days but not immediately, may wait for a number of hours or be told to go home and come back the next day.
White: Dismiss/Walking Wounded
Patients have minor injuries; first aid and home care are sufficient, a doctor’s care is not required.
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Now, once our triage team has finished with the sorting, what do they do next? They turn their attention toward treating the highest priority cases. They can do this with greater peace of mind and focus because they know every case has been reviewed and prioritised. To avoid random and reactive treatment – and potentially losing sight of true priorities – they’ve first concentrated on completing an efficient and focused sorting process before getting down to work.
EMAIL TRIAGE
So, to make this work for your email a couple of things are needed:
(Skeptics, take note – this ‘extra step’ of processing will actually save you time, contrary to your fears. See here and here and here for more on this.)
To triage your email well, your brain may also need to get better at:
Imagine, then, a triage system for your emails:
Cautionary note to organising junkies:
Am I suggesting you create an elaborate colour-coding scheme for your emails? Please…no! It’s a metaphor.
Ready to move beyond the figurative?
Read this for how to set up some follow-up email files that work for lots of folks. Or take our course to learn how to do all this really well in Outlook, using your Calendar and Tasks better. Non-Outlook users, try Remember the Milk. When you’re ready to get good and truly sorted, check out this course to learn how to triage everything – not just email – using our FAST Formula.
One more thing – pop over to our Productivity Poll and tell us how many emails are in your inbox right now. The fun bit? You can see what everybody else said. It will either make you feel great or give you a good giggle. Both are nice.
Filed under: Email, Focus, Info-Overload | 3 Comments »
Filed under: Email, Productivity Polls | 1 Comment »
Less than 2 weeks after my first test run of Remember the Milk, my mobile world has been changed forever.
Since Milk wouldn’t run on my trusty Treo, it has now been retired and – at long last – there’s an iPhone in my bag. Seems the folks at RTM should have gotten commission on the sale.
I’ve weaned myself from desktop-driven Outlook Tasks and am now living 100% on Milk – no matter where I am.
I used to make fun of my husband for the amount of time he spends ‘playing with his phone.’ I’ve just spent the weekend doing the same thing, and I am one happy – and productive – camper. Now he and I are sharing tasks through Milk and talking about standardising our tags so our smartlists will play nicely with each other. Our poor children have such geeks for parents.
Besides Remember the Milk, here were my other must-haves on the Home screen: Outlook calendar sync, Zoho and Google Docs for omni-access to our company info, Plaxo for personal contacts, Kodak Gallery for the pix and a nifty Hong Kong Weather app for typhoon season.
I’ve only had one hiccup with my new set-up: My kids selected the ringtone (a very loud ‘old phone’) and SMS alert (an equally loud old car horn), and I hadn’t worked out how to set the phone to silent before going into my first meeting today – during which I received 2 calls and 3 text messages. I do know how to switch it off now – ahem.
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