Part of my job is supporting customers’ mail files and I see two types of users: those that are in control of their email and those that are not. Those that are in control of their email rarely call me with email issues because they don’t have any. Email is a tool that they control. Those not in control have overflowing inboxes and and cannot be counted on to consistently reply to messages, usually because they never saw them or can’t find your message so they can respond. For those people, they are a slave to their inbox and its a never ending supply of incoming messages.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to be a slave to your email but in order to become the master, you’ve got to make some serious changes to how you manage your incoming messages.
First, empty your inbox. Move them to a folder, delete them, do whatever you need to do to start fresh. Be realistic, you aren’t going to sort through them all and catch up. If you could catch up, you would have done so by now. If deleting everything is making you nervous, at least go through and delete all the junk mail and emails you don’t need to keep and archive the rest. Sort by sender or date to remove multiple messages at once. The goal is to start with a clean slate.
The first rule of email is to Touch It Once. The Touch It Once rule states that once you’ve read a message you must respond, move to a folder, or delete it after you’ve read the message. We waste so much time reading emails and then doing nothing with them and then we have to come back to the message, reread it again and then decide to take some sort of action. And while we are in the doing nothing stage, more email is coming in every hour and now we’ve added more messages into this vicious cycle.
This rule can be a tough to follow all the time. I admit there are times when I break my own rules and I advise you to do the same for messages that may require more thought to compose a response or if I need more information before I can respond. And never follow this rule for emotionally charged or confrontational situations. Pick up the phone or speak to the person face-to-face to resolve the issue because you can’t convey tone in an email.
But the majority of the email that comes in can be acted upon as soon as you read it. Read it and then respond, move it to a folder, or delete it. You will not go back and deal with all of your email later. Trust me, you won’t.
Read it and then act on it. Take control of your email. Make your email work for you instead of you being worked by your email.
Coming up next: The Second Rule of Email: Check It Less
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Great topic and article. I’m definitely in the “overflowing inbox” camp. I’ve found the indexing/search capabilities of the desktop clients to help me manage and locate data, but your points of acting on the message once and the potential for overlooking messages are spot on.
My biggest challenge is determining how to organize mail into folders (sender, topic, project, etc). Sometimes that becomes overwhelming in and of itself. I’ve found that gmail has an “archive” option to move stuff from your inbox into a bulk, set aside place. It’s out of site of your Inbox, but you can still get to it. I have yet to see MS Exchange/Outlook offer a similar option accept if using PST files. My employer restricts us from using PSTs. There’s also the opportunity to mis-file. Will future articles address these topics?
Great question about MS Exchange/Office! We will see if we can do some research and see what options are available for you.
While there are some emails that we need to keep for future reference, at least half if not more do not need to be kept. The urge to keep it “just in case I need it later” is very strong and hard to resist. A good way to start changing your mindset is to save/archive messages as you normally would for a period of time, say 60 days. Once the 60 days are over, reflect back on how often did you go back and look at those old messages. If you can, delete those messages with the knowledge that you haven’t needed them in the past 60 days so the chances are very low you will need them in the future. And start being a little tougher with what messages you keep around and what you delete as soon as you review it.
Technology will only do so much. The root issue is how we behave towards email, so we need to look at how we can change our behavior before we start throwing more technology at it.