Back to Basics: Take Control of Your Email
If your inbox runs you, your school feels it. Email is where parents share worries, teachers ask for help, vendors send invoices, and board members drop ideas that can change your week. When the inbox is chaotic, leaders get reactive and scattered. When it is clear, you make steady decisions, protect instructional minutes, and lower the temperature for everyone. The simplest way I know to get there is to run your email with the spirit of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, not as a productivity hobby, but as a calm, repeatable practice.
Start by naming the purpose of the inbox. It is a loading dock, not a warehouse. Let everything land there, then capture and clarify the very next visible action for each message. If you can do that action in under two minutes, reply or forward now, then file it. If it will take longer, move the message to Action Items. If someone else owes the next step, move it to Waiting On and add a five word note, waiting on facilities ticket number, or waiting on parent consent list. If the message is finished business or reference, file it into one of your archive folders by functional area, for example Admissions, Academics, Operations, HR, Advancement. These are your shelves. The inbox is only the table where you sort.
Build this structure once, then trust it. Create two working folders, Action Items and Waiting On, and a set of archive folders for your key functions. Turn on keyboard shortcuts. Star or flag the few Action Items you must touch today, and keep that list short. Add simple rules so newsletters and no reply messages skip the inbox and land in the right archive folder marked as read. Consider a rule that applies a star to messages from your supervisor or board chair. Block two short triage windows on your weekday calendar, for example 10:30 and 2:30, and a fifteen minute weekly review on Friday.
Now the most important premise. Do not work from your inbox. When you work from your inbox, you are following a to-do list that other people created for you. Your role is to set priorities based on mission, safety, learning, and deadlines. The way to do that is to work from Action Items, not from whatever happens to arrive next. The inbox is a stream. Your Action Items folder is your plan.
Here is the daily flow. Start with a quick triage round, ten minutes is enough. Apply the two minute rule, route everything else to Action Items, Waiting On, or an archive folder, and get the inbox close to zero. Later, open Action Items and do a focused block. Finish the day by scanning Waiting On for anything that needs a nudge and by setting two priorities for tomorrow. You will never be perfectly caught up, and you do not need to be. You only need a trusted place to look when you have time and energy to give.
Friday is your governor against drift. In the weekly review, sweep Waiting On first and nudge anything older than five school days. Prune Action Items to the real work, and put time boxes on your calendar for tasks that require a block. Skim your archive folders. Save what matters to shared drives and delete what you can. Finally, name the three to seven live projects on your plate, hiring a math teacher, attendance campaign, parent open house, and make sure each has a single next step captured in Action Items or on your calendar.
Protect your focus. Turn off desktop pop ups. Never open a message twice without deciding what it is. Do not use the inbox as a to-do list, work from Action Items. Sensitive topics deserve a phone call first, then a short email for the record.
Run your email with intention, grounded in David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and you will make space for the leadership work only you can do.