Take charge of your e-mail!
ABSTRACTAlthough e-mail is supposed to help save time and increase efficiency, for many it has become a burden. You can fight e-mail overload by taking steps to decrease the amount of unwanted e-mail you receive and by managing your in-box in an organized manner.
KEY POINTS
- Decrease the amount of unwanted e-mail by zealously guarding your e-mail address, separating work e-mail from personal e-mail, and encouraging coworkers to follow appropriate e-mail etiquette.
- Handle the messages you receive in a disciplined and consistent manner. Schedule regular times to deal with e-mail.
- Delete spam messages without viewing images and without clicking on links. File any information that may be needed later. Messages that need action require one of the “four Ds”: delete it, do it, delegate it, or defer it.
- Never open a message and then close it without doing anything about it.
ORGANIZE YOUR E-MAIL AND RELATED INFORMATION
Once you have limited the amount of unwanted e-mail, the next step is to deal with the remaining messages.
The task is difficult, for several reasons. Some people feel they will need the information in their e-mail at a later date and thus don’t want to remove it from the in-box. Some messages may require a significant amount of thought or time to respond to and cannot be dealt with immediately. Having limits on the amount of e-mail that can be stored in the in-box adds to the problem, as older messages have to be stored outside the in-box, creating one more place you will have to search for them. Having multiple computers and locations where you check your e-mail also adds to the problem. In the workplace, e-mail is used increasingly as a task- and project-management tool—something it was not designed to be.4 This leads to procrastination in dealing with e-mail and a fear of not being able to find information when needed or not remembering to follow up on items in the e-mail.
Be methodical
First, decide on when and how often you will work on your in-box. Depending on your preference and work schedule, you may check e-mail several times a day or just once. Reserving a dedicated time in your daily schedule (either early in the morning or later in the evening) is probably the best way to deal with e-mail that you cannot readily reply to because it requires some thinking or action on your part.
Analyze your activities and create an organized list of folders and subfolders for each activity. An additional strategy is to prefix important folders with a number so that they appear near the top of an alphabetized list in order of importance that you assign.
Create an identical folder structure in your in-box, on your primary computer, and in a safe location that is backed up regularly, eg, a network drive or Web storage service. As activities change, update this folder structure on a regular basis.
Create rules to allow easier scanning and sorting of e-mail messages. For example, messages from mailing lists can automatically be moved to a specific folder, or messages from your boss can be color-coded in red. These features depend on your e-mail client.
Deal with your legitimate e-mail by type
Regardless of the folder structure and rules that you apply to organize your e-mail, you have to go through all your messages regularly, say, at the end of the day. One of the best strategies is to never open a message and then close it without doing anything with it. At the minimum, try to categorize each message when you first open it. Messages can be classified by content and by the type of action required.
Reference items have information that you might need later and that needs to be saved in an appropriate location. Depending on when and where you might need the information again, you need to save it in the appropriate folder in your in-box, on your hard drive, or in a network or web drive. Remember that the folders in your in-box count towards the total limit of your e-mail storage. The benefit of storing it in your in-box is that you can access it from any computer from which you can access your e-mail.
Notices about events or meetings. Decide if you may want to attend or not. In the latter case, delete the message. If you do think you may want to attend, you can move the information to your calendar and create an appointment, possibly with a reminder. This will let you view the information at the time it is needed. One point to keep in mind is that if you move the item to your calendar, it will disappear from your mailbox. In some cases, appointment request messages (Lotus Notes, Outlook) will automatically move from your in-box to your calendar once you “accept” the event (meeting) notice.
Action items need some type of action on your part. There are four actions you can take with the message: delete it, do it, delegate it, or defer it.10 You can do several things to remind yourself to deal with them later. In some e-mail programs you can:
- Mark them as unread
- Flag them for follow-up with reminders (in some cases with different-colored flags)
- Change the e-mail messages to tasks with reminders: marking or flagging the items will then allow you to easily fllter or sort the items that you had deferred initially and will provide you flexibility to take appropriate actions at a convenient time.
