LeanMail Plan allows you to take notes and afix deadlines to emails directly in your inbox, giving you an overview of your mails according to urgency.

LeanMail Plan is just one of several LeanMail solutions that can be combined or used separately in order to take your email experience to the highest level of efficiency and effectiveness.

LeanMail Plan is for any Microsoft Outlook user that wants to ensure that mails are never forgotten or answered too late, and who want a clear overview of what needs to be done and when mails need to be answered.

Before we review the challenges and solutions, let’s first understand why we should plan mails in the first place.

There are three compelling reasons for planning email:

1. Prioritizing (value) is not the same as planning (urgency). We need systems for both.
2. Since we can’t get everything done in one day, we need to ensure that we act upon the most important mails at the most appropriate times,
3. It’s extremely difficult to keep track of when things are due without a lot of dragging and dropping into tasks or the calendar; which are also not foolproof work-arounds.

Even if you have an excellent system for prioritizing (see LeanMail Prioritize), priority is not the same as urgency, so you need a way of handing both characteristics of a mail.

To exemplify this, imagine that you have an email that you would like to bring up at a board meeting today. That board meeting is both important (high priority) and urgent (today). Now imagine that the board meeting takes place in three months. While the importance of the mail has not changed, its urgency has. You need an easy way of ensuring that mail is front and center on the day of that meeting.

Remove waste

The process of deciding on what you need to do and when you need to do it are arguably the most important decisions each mail forces you to make.

Without planning mails we end up re-reading and re-analyzing the same mails over and over again. Half of the time we waste managing email comes from having to re-read the same mails over and over again.
Get an overview

When mails are planned in your inbox, you are able to have an overview of exactly what you need to do and when you need to do it.
Reduce stress

Nine out of ten times, stress is caused by insecurity about the future. By planning your mails, you eliminate any nasty surprises and have complete control over your inbox. You are aware of your workload and can strategically re-plan mails according to ever-changing situations.