9 Email Management Tips for Busy Architects

If Antoni Gaudi had used Help Scout, would the Sagrada Familia have been finished a century ago? It would not. But he might have upset fewer colleagues along the way. 

Architecture involves an incredible amount of communication and organization between many different parties, and the skills involved in the design work don’t necessarily solve the challenges of overflowing inboxes.

If you're struggling to manage an unruly email inbox, these nine email management tips for architects will help, whether you’re designing a basilica or a basement.

The challenges and opportunities of email for architects

Email is older than the internet, cheap, (mostly) reliable, and it can’t be bought or shut down by a tech giant. You can own your email and move it wherever you like.

That matters because architects live and work inside a web of clients and consultants: contractors, assessors, suppliers, engineers, services, all needing answers, leaving comments, making changes. Often it's email that becomes the final record of all of those conversations. 

In writing this article, I spoke to Annie Rummelhoff, associate principal at integrated design firm, Mithun. We think of email as a back-and-forth replacement for physical mail, but for Annie, email also represents a sort of off-board memory storing years of information about people and projects. 

Rough news for Annie’s closest work friends, perhaps, but it's an indication of the value she finds in having an archive of email to refer back to and constantly build on.

Email can be a legal record, an external memory, and a tool for capturing decisions and clarifying thinking. Email has its limitations, of course. Being text-focused, it can be difficult to use for more visual recordkeeping. Text can strip out feelings and all the nuances of tone and body language that change the meaning of words.

All the many stakeholders in a building project have their own tools and systems to track their work and handle communications. Discussions happening in those tools, or on site, or on the phone, can lead to fragmentation, with some critical information becoming inaccessible.

Which tools are in play, and how they are used can vary widely according to the people and firms involved. As Shaun Thodey, architect at his own boutique firm Thodey Design, told me:

Keeping on top of email management helps architects reduce risks, preserve knowledge, and ultimately improve the final outcome for their clients. Below are our top tips to keep that inbox on track.

9 email management tips for architects

The nine tips below will help you get better control of your inbox. None of these will overhaul your practice overnight, but used together, they can turn your inbox from a daily headache into one of the most useful tools in your studio.

1. Enforce naming conventions

In an architect’s inbox, emails might be needed today, and again in five years time when that second stage build finally happens. By consistently naming files and subject lines, either manually or automatically, you can make everything easier to find. Define a system, share it with your team, and stick to it.

Something simple like {client name}-{project-name}-{date} lets you narrow down quickly.

2. Use email as the official record

Critical decisions for any given project will be made outside of email threads: meetings in your offices, on Zoom, on site, inside a project management tool, or over the phone while you’re in the stands at your kid’s swimming lessons.

Wherever those decisions are made, follow up with an email recording the final decision. It's a chance to ensure everybody understands what was decided, and also to preserve the context of that decision in a form that will remain accessible for as long as you need it.

It doesn’t have to start with email, but it should end there.

3. Make your institutional memory accessible

So your email is an archive…great. Now how will you retrieve information later? Using a shared Gmail inbox can work fine for just a couple of people, but if you’ve got more than that, you’ll want more specific tools.

At Mithun, a company with three offices and 220 people, TonicDM is part of the solution. It’s specialized communications software for architecture and engineering firms. These are project information management (PIM) tools that wrap up emails, all the associated file management, and the construction administration work together into a single comprehensive system.

If you are dealing with many projects and at a larger scale, that sort of integrated system is worth considering. It’s a big step up from the simplicity of an email inbox, though, so if your needs are not as broad you don’t need to go that far.

Help desk software like Help Scout might be a good middle ground between email and a more complex solution. It comes with a layer of organizational and retrieval tools so that you can find what you need whenever you need it. Moving from an email inbox to a help desk is an easy step to make, and if you’re familiar with Gmail, you’ll feel immediately at home in a well-designed help desk tool.

Help desk platforms also let you add your whole team to the tool, which helps make all of the current and historical project knowledge more accessible to everyone. Then when you want to find that one email from John who asked about the door trim in 2023, you can bring it up with a couple of clicks and assign it directly to the right designer.

Time saved is money made.

4. Use status flags to plan your work

The key to quickly processing a busy inbox is deciding what you need to work on and what can wait. Familiarize yourself with your inbox tool and make use of the status and flagging options to sort your work. In Gmail, for example you might use stars or labels to note critical emails and help you find them later.

If you know that you can’t act on an email right now, but will need to later, using a snooze option will get it out of your way until you need to see it, leaving you with a more focused queue to work on.

Help Scout offers labels and a snooze feature, but you can also go a step further by explicitly marking a conversation as active, pending, or closed. If you need to follow up, leave it active. If you’re waiting on someone external to respond, use pending. And once it’s resolved, switch it to closed. That way you won’t waste time re-reading something you can’t actually work on yet.

Pair help desk statuses with good internal notes (or AI summarization tools) so that your colleagues can get a brief summary without having to read through a long conversation, and now you’re not just saving your own time, you’re accelerating everyone on the team.

5. Use views and labels to maintain visibility and set priorities

Labels aren’t just good for planning work. Along with inbox views and folders, adding labels can help you see just what you need to see in any given situation.

For example, you may want to see all unresolved questions from your structural engineer across all ongoing projects, or all client emails that are waiting on a sign off. Creating a view or folder based on the sender or relevant tag allows you to focus on those conversations.

Another view that might be important if you have service level agreements (SLAs) with your clients is one that is time-based. You can have emails that have been sitting for a certain amount of time without a response move into their own folder so your team can see which messages need to be handled ASAP.

Unlike with a regular email client, in Help Scout you can have views that look across multiple teams and assignees, so they aren’t changing where anything is actually filed, just creating a way for you to see those messages in one place.

The platform also has an SLA feature that allows you to set an overall SLA policy or multiple policies that are customer specific. This will ensure that you’re alerted whenever an SLA is at risk.

6. Automate your filing

Managing email can be time consuming work, and no client really wants to pay for an hour spent shuffling emails around. Help desks and other email management tools offer lots of ways to remove the manual work of deciding which email goes where.

You can use automatic workflows to look for particular words in the subject or body of the email and tag them accordingly. This is where the consistent naming from point one can really pay off by making automated tagging simple.

You can also tag emails based on the sender, company, whether it contains an attachment, as well as several other criteria. A single email might even be tagged for two or three different reasons, so it can be found by several different searches or appear in multiple folders or views.

You’re unlikely to bother doing all of that manually every time an email comes in, and even if you are, it’s tricky to consistently make the same tagging or filing choices. Smart automation removes both effort and risk, and makes everything more accessible down the road.

Spend the time up front once to define some rules, and reap the benefit for years to come.

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7. Create role-based inboxes

At Thodey Design, an info@ email address is used for inquiries and prospects while he and his wife, who is also an architect and co-owner, keep all emails relating to their own projects in their personal inboxes.

At Mithun, at a scale where roles can be more specialized, emails are routed into one of several inboxes based on the incoming email address: general info@ inquiries, marketing@ for prospective clients, accounting@ for accounts payable and receivable. Splitting the incoming emails means each team only has to handle emails most relevant to their work, and can more easily get a clear perspective on what they need to do.

There can be other reasons to split off into multiple inboxes too. You might have separate access points, for example, for permits@, or for specific project teams. Splitting those out by address makes it easy to correctly route messages to the right people, to associate them with the correct views and folders, and also to report on the volume and performance of your team across those areas.

However, different email addresses don’t necessarily have to be sent into different inboxes. Sticking with one inbox is a good default option in the beginning because it means you have only one spot to review, and you can apply all your tools and saved replies to any email.

As your incoming volume (and team size) grows, splitting them out can make sense and reduce an overwhelming queue into manageable discrete queues, but it’s fine to sit on that decision until the time is right. 

8. Use tools that collate emails from multiple people and organizations

Especially during the construction process, a lot of communication is happening on specialist platforms like Procore or Bluebeam that centralize things for the various people working on the project. That makes sense, but it does risk fragmenting information about the project because they don’t always have the earlier context or capture conversations beyond the project’s initial end date.

If you’re working with those tools, look for ways to capture the email notifications they send into your email source of truth so you have the full picture for your later reference. A good way to get a quick overview of what’s possible is to look up their integrations page. Here’s Help Scout’s own list of integrations, for example, showing all the ways you can connect your support queue into your other business tools.

More general automation tools, like Zapier, can be a helpful bridge between different systems even if they don’t directly talk to each other. Procore supports integrations via Zapier, as does Help Scout. 

9. Don’t use email when it doesn’t make sense

Email is not a cure-all. There are times when a specialized tool will do the job more quickly and more efficiently than email will. Sometimes that could be a complex piece of software. Other times, it might just mean a simple phone call. As Annie said:

In architecture particularly, a quick sketch or a sample photo could save thousands of words in an email chain. Use email in the moment when it is helpful, rely on it for your long-term storage, but don’t force every conversation into the shape of your inbox.

Email is a communication hub

Think of your email inboxes not just as a hub for active conversation, but also as an archive of institutional knowledge that is building over time. For architects and the people they work with, keeping all those people aligned over long periods of time relies heavily on consistent, accessible, clear communication.

With some simple tweaks and a handful of lightweight processes, architects can make email management not just easier to do, but also a positive benefit to the end product of all the work.