Managing your overstuffed inbox
3 steps to controlling e-mail overload
By Sheryl Steinberg
“Dealing with my e-mail is like a 911 call,” says Andy Walker, a technology journalist and executive producer of the Butterscotch.com technology site. Managing seven e-mail accounts and receiving about 300 daily e-mail messages (excluding spam), Walker goes into emergency mode regularly, scrambling to make room for incoming messages. Life would be easier, he admits, if he better managed his messages.
It’s common to have hundreds of e-mail in your inbox, says Christina Cavanagh, author of Managing Your E-mail: Thinking Outside the Inbox (John Wiley & Sons, 2003). “When you’re facing this many e-mails, it can be very daunting,” she says. “You have to deal with them. They don’t go away.”
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Go with tried and true techniques
There’s no doubt that the number of e-mailed messages is escalating at a rapid rate. Market research firm The Radicati Group estimates that the average office worker sends and receives about 156 e-mails a day — a number expected to rise 50 per cent by 2012.
Fortunately, organizing your mountain of an inbox is easier than you think. Sure, there are a lot of cool e-mail tools and applications you can use, but Cavanagh suggests starting with some good, old-fashioned techniques that can be applied to any e-mail program.
- Think of your inbox as a central holding place reserved only for e-mail upon which you have to act. Everything else should be deleted, forwarded (delegated to someone else) or, if important, placed in subfolders.
- Don’t automatically communicate via e-mail. While e-mail is great for quickly transmitting bits of information, the immediacy of phone conversations is better for collaborating and building dialogue.
- Ask senders to stop forwarding chain letters and joke e-mail, and don’t forget to unsubscribe to no longer relevant e-newsletters.
Use e-mail tools
You should also take advantage of under-used tools in your e-mail program. Take the e-bull by the horns, says Judy Gleeson, an Outlook expert and Australia’s resident “Desk Doctor.”
- Set your e-mail account to divert suspected spam to a separate folder. In web-based e-mail, the setting should be under a designation such as Mail Options. In Outlook, use Rules and Alerts (Tools > Rules and Alerts) to identify low-value e-mail (chain mail, reply-to-alls, spam) and keep e-mail interruptions to a minimum.
- Classify your e-mail in meaningful categories that relate to a specific project or person. Once they are categorized, you can view them by these groups. In web-based e-mail, find this option under Filters or a similar designation. In Outlook, click the Categories button in any open Task, Meeting or Contact.
- Don’t use e-mail to schedule work appointments and communicate with co-workers about a project. Your e-mail has specific tools to make these notifications easier. In web-based e-mail, go into your Calendar to add Tasks and assign who can access those events. In Outlook, use Outlook Tasks (designed to help with project management and record what was done and when) to eliminate back and forth e-mail. Select New in your Tasks folder to create a file, and then click on Assign Task in the menu to change the Owner. Enter the recipient in the To field to send a Task Request. You’ll receive notification once the request is accepted or declined.
Download a plug-in
Those who use Outlook rather than web-based e-mail for the majority of their communications may want to consider a couple of free plug-ins. These help monitor and analyze your inbox and help you determine how to better manage your Outlook e-mail.
Xobni uncovers hidden e-mail patterns and identifies everything from your busiest traffic times to whom your top senders are. It is especially helpful if you’re regularly receiving multiple e-mails from unwanted sources. After installing the Xobni plug-in, you’ll see your usual Outlook interface, but with an extra toolbar. This toolbar puts everything about the sender (phone numbers, previous e-mail, social network alliances) right in front of you. You don’t have to search Outlook or navigate out of the e-mail.
ClearContext Personal sifts through your e-mail history to rank your contacts by importance and colour codes them for quick and easy identification. It also unclogs your inbox of automated notification e-mail, such as those from Facebook and LinkedIn, by placing them in a separate folder that you can review later.
Little by little, these proven strategies can make a big impact on your time, inbox and productivity.
