Email Management

In the last post, we covered the overall need for an effective process to control time. Failure to do so puts the control into the hands of others and their time.

Today we will look specifically at email and it's impact on your time and productivity. One of the biggest challenges that we face daily is getting control of the Inbox.  And do not kid yourself, it is an enormous task to complete.

In most cases, your inbox is out of control! If you have mail on a corporate server, how many times have you been in "Email Jail". In other words, your mailbox is full. No more email in or out until you begin to clean it out. Trust me, and I speak from personal experience, having to spend hours going through email just for the sake of having access to your email is far from being a productive use of your time.

So as we did a bit deeper, I have some questions for you to answer. How many total items do you have in your inbox? For those using Outlook, look on the bottom left and you will see an item count. Is it 20? 50? 100+? Or are you in the thousands?

How many of you use the Inbox as your to-do list?

How do you feel with several pages of email in your mailbox? IS scrolling to the end time consuming? Do you have to use the search function to find the email that you need NOW?

Yikes! Is that really what email can do to you? Surely you are exaggerating. Not so. The average email user has hundreds of emails sitting in the Inbox. That creates STRESS! Fixing this by moving items is not a long term fix, but it is a short term remedy. So lets start there.

First, do not use the Inbox as the catch-all folder! Your first goal will be to clear your Inbox daily. To to so will require you to schedule uninterrupted time to process it. Depending on your volume of emails, you may allocate time three to five times a day. Four is best but be flexible. Remember, your single focus will be on processing the email.

Read the items once! And then decide...
Do it now - if you have the information requested, get it done!

Delegate it - Is there a member of your team that more readily has the information (or the time) to respond? If so, are they not the right person to address the email? Sure they are.

Defer it - are the actions required in the email due NOW, or in the immediate future? If so, you handled it through one of the above choices, either Do It Now or Delegate. If it is not time critical or has a number of actions that occur across days...Defer.

Delete it - you read the email and it is either not pertinent to your functional area, is informational only and no action needs to be taken, or it just might be SPAM! So read it and then get rid of it! It's the big X on the top of the ribbon panel for those not familiar with deleting email! :-)

You will need to create folders that you can store action items that were deferred, for important documents that you may need to refer to, and for tracking purposes. Careful planning here saves time in the future. Don't just create 100's of folders so that you can get the Inbox cleaned up. That defeats the purpose.

Set up "Rules" for your Inbox. Outlook has the capability to filter, sort, and organize emails into folders that were set up. Some examples of rules to be set up... junk mail, Cc mail (these are informational, right? If you were to respond, you should be in the "To" address line.

Sound easy? It can be but a few things to consider.

Outlook is not set up to be an effective tool  right out of the box. It requires some changes to how Outlook looks and feels.

There are action steps to be taken on your part once you have Outlook (or another email platform) settings changed. Outlook is a tool. It is not the sole answer.

Discipline. The best tools in the world are not worth 2 cents if you don't effectively use them.

That's the overview of email. Next we will cover just what steps that you will take to accomplish the actions above.