I'm so, so really bad at it. I mean, I'm purely awful. I receive so much e-mail a day that it's basically just read, delete, read, file, read, delete, read, delete. I have e-mail from over a year ago that I should respond to. I usually wait so long that I just figure it's been too long to reply now, and then I file it away.
Does this sound familiar? Thanks to a world-wide adoption of email by businesses and individuals, this is the sort of problem that ordinary people are facing everyday. Up until a few years ago, most of us did not have the added pressure of having to deal with incoming email on a continual basis during our work day, or of having to check it from home at least once a day. We could sit at our desks or computers and work on an urgent report with our phone taking voicemail or being redirected - and strangely enough the world didn't collapse around our ears because we were not immediately responding to emails. I believe time management skills now need to also include managing email. While I am no expert in this area, I am able to keep my email under control using some of the following techniques, which I would like to share with you.
Schedule your email time: You could block off periods of time in your day that are 'no email' or reverse, block periods of time where email is acceptable. Personally I find that I can work better if I deliberately switch my email off while I have other work to handle, as I find that if I leave it running then email gets an automatic priority, often to the detriment of whatever task I was involved in at the time. I believe you must decide when to read email - this control should not rest with everyone out there who sends emails to you. For example, I will not log onto my email until I have completed one hour at my desk first thing in the morning; this means I can plan my day, deal with issues from the previous day, set up meetings and do necessary paperwork. Having set up the day to cater for my own needs, then I will log on and see what email awaits me.
I have found that if I log on first, hours can go by where I deal with often petty things, read and forward because the mail was not relevant to me, get engrossed in gossip, respond to personal greetings or jokes, or go off on a tangent with work I had no intention of dealing with on this particular day. If I have at least some chance to put my work priorities first, I find that I am not so tempted to spend great amounts of time with email that does not require my immediate attention.
Keep email quiet: If none of the above suggestions are possible, and you need to keep your email running while engrossed in other tasks, then at least consider muting the speaker on your computer so that you do not receive an audio notification of the email arriving.
Be realistic about answering your email: I allocate time when I need a break from a task to go and deal with my email, because even though you make think that it will only take five minutes to check your email, invariably something will require action from you - a reply, reading an attachment or supplying some information. This means you are then forced to work reactively, when perhaps you had other priorities over and above the 15 minutes you had allocated to email.
Sound the alarm: Employ an egg timer, a miniature clock alarm, a watch alarm or set a Microsoft Outlook Calendar reminder to jog your memory to when you have spent enough time with your email. If you have to leave your house or office at 10am for a meeting, set the alarm to buzz just prior to that time.
File it: Set up folders for your incoming work. I know this sounds obvious, but it is surprising how people many simply leave all their email in the Inbox. Go to File, choose New and then Folder. Make as many folders as you need, based on your work and the categories of emails you receive or based on who has sent them (you will know best how to categorise them). Making email folders is the same idea as labeling manila folders to put in a filing cabinet. When you need to keep an email drag and drop it with your mouse in the relevant folder.
Sent mail: Think about making folders for your outgoing emails – have a folder structure under the sent folder based on who you are sending email to, and move the important ones you need to keep into those folders. The sent folder can also end up with an unmanageable amount of email in it, so consider doing this and make sure you include the Sent folder when you do an email clean up and delete.
Deal with the email, don't just leave it all in the Inbox: There is nothing like a bit of extra stress from looking at an email inbox containing 300 – 400 emails, some opened, some not; have you replied, did you forward it, it all becomes too hard. Try and make it a practice to read it and deal with it - respond, delete it, forward it or file or it, but don't just leave it sitting there in your inbox thinking you will come back later. It is the same principle that is applied to stacks of paper of your desk, once you leave the email without dealing with it, the next time you come back you will need to waste time and re-read the emails to work out what you need to do with them.
Clean out regularly: Try and go through your inbox and sent box say once a month (e.g. nominate the first or last date in the month), give it a limit of 15 minutes and start cleaning out old emails. This also ensures your system runs more efficiently as well as making it easier for you to find things that are really important.
Email Rules: why not set up a couple of rules for your incoming email where your weekly joke, or daily inspirational message or emails from particular people are immediately filed in a particular folder, that way you check the folders when you a ready to read the messages. I suggest you read about rules in Outlook's help menus, but just to get started, you create a rule for a message by right clicking the message, then choosing 'create rule', and specifying the criteria for the rule. For example, you keep getting spam from a particular person, so you could create a rule and specify that when mail comes from that email account it is to immediately be deleted (deletion being one of the rules you can choose).
Delete email before it gets to Outlook: Go to your e-mail's server first thing via their website (e.g. Telstra.com or Optusnet.com.au) and delete all the spam and rubbish email before it even arrives in your email outbox.
Good Subjects: Ask your email contacts (personal and business where possible) to utilize the subject lines. This will help you to ascertain whether your incoming mail is urgent, a follow-up or trivial, because knowing the urgency of a message will help you to determine how soon you need to read and respond to the contents.
Extra email addresses: Consider setting up additional email addresses for personal use, or work-specific use. Most internet service providers provide you with 5 email addresses otherwise use a free one at Hotmail or Yahoo. This has the added benefit of stopping some unsolicited email or advertising arriving in your work email inbox and allows you to use that secondary account when you visit websites that require an email address before you can use them and you do not necessarily wish to give out your legitimate email details.
Good luck in using these strategies to work more effectively with your email.
Angela is a workplace IT Educator, counsellor and social researcher. Her area of interest is in how technology intersects with human relations. She has recently finished her PhD in Education and expects to be awarded in April. She can be found at http://angelalewis.com.au
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