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Thursday, January 5, 2012

E-Mail Tips - Draining the Swamp

"Your mailbox has exceeded it's limit." This is the message that I would get twice a week, that set my teeth on edge. I would have to stop everything I was doing to spend an hour creating enough space so that I can communicate with the person sitting next to me. After years of wishing there was something I could do about it, I finally stopped making excuses and took responsibility for my own part in the creation of the Email Swamp. Here are some things that I put into practice that really work.

  1. Don't check your messages every two minutes. You'll never get anything else done and if it's urgent, they should have called. Set aside a half an hour every two hours to answer e-mail. By that time, you should be able to just delete a good portion of them, because everyone else has already responded and you don't need to read all 14 e-mails.
  2. Turn off all automatic notifications. Better yet, shut down your e-mail program, in between the times you are scheduled to check and answer e-mail. This will help you to not get distracted and stick to point #1.
  3. Save the attachments, delete the e-mail.
  4. When checking your e-mails, determine which ones you may need to reference later and move them into a folder. Once a month, go through your folders and delete anything that is more than three months old. If someone asks you about it after that, I'm sure they will understand if you told them you deleted it.
  5. If the message is something that you need to follow up on, USE YOUR FLAGS! That's what they're there for. Feel free to create your own system that works for you, but as an example, mine works like this: Red-Follow Up ASAP, Green-Need to Create and/or Research (might take a while, but I need to get working on it), Blue-Need to follow up later, at a specific date, Yellow-Information needed for specific projects, Purple-waiting on someone else. I also add reminders to my follow up flags and keep my e-mail sorted that way, rather than by date. (The new, un-flagged e-mails will sort by date after the flagged ones.) By the way, if your e-mail program does not have any kind of flagging system for follow-up, it's time to upgrade.

Just like any other addiction, this is a process. It's not easy to realize that the world continues turning, even if you don't know everything that happens the instant it happens. However, try to think about the time that you will gain back by being more organized and efficient with your e-mails. Maybe you could read a book.


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