The other night I was talking with some colleagues and they were complaining about having to deal with so much e-mail every day. I naively asked them how much e-mail they get in a day. I was surprised when the answers ranged for 10 to 50. I sometime wish I only got 50 relevant important e-mails a day. The fact is I get close to 100 or more a day, and that is not including spam. They all require my attention, but thankfully not all of them require a response. So how do I deal with them?
The most important tip that I cannot stress enough is to not deal with them as they arrive. Set a specified time when you will answer e-mails, and also be sure to set the amount of time you will devote to answering e-mails. I normally give myself two hours a day, one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening to answer my e-mails. When you get snail mail delivered you don’t immediately answer the mail. PLus the first thing most people do is sort their mail before opening it. If it works in the non digital world, what prevents it from working in the digital world.
One of the hardest things I had to learn when dealing with large amounts of e-mail is to not feel compelled to answer each and every e-mail immediately upon reading it. After I read the e-mail I assign it to two different categories. The first being the nature of the e-mail. For example if it is an e-mail having to deal with this blog it is assign as “TCBlog”, if it has to do with Google Adsense I tag it as “Adsense”. The next category that I assign it is the priority it requires an answer.
If you ever take an emergency responder or first aid course they always teach you to survey the situation. After your survey you perform triage and deal with the most life threaten situations first. This is similar to how I deal with e-mail. I have different levels of priority for my e-mails.
- Requires Immediate Action – These are e-mails that require urgent decisions and as the name says immediate action. I try to use this category sparingly. Things that would fall into this group would be responses to contract offers, emergency support etc. I will sometimes answers these right after reading them, if not the are top of the list when I am done sorting my e-mail.
- Requires Follow Up – These are e-mails that do require me to act on them but there is no urgency. If they get answered today or tomorrow all is well. Most of my business correspondence falls with in this category.
- Requires next day Follow Up – The e-mails that are tagged here are mostly of a personal nature.These will be the first e-mails I will answer tomorrow after sorting my e-mail and dealing with the R.A.T.S.
- No Follow Up – These are those e-mails that are alerting me to something, or from mailing lists that I follow. They don’t require an answer and are not time sensitive, but they are still of value to me. I read these at my leisure. Or something new that I have been trying is to have the computer read these out to me while I am performing other tasks. So far this is working very well, but I’ll save that for another post.
- Junk Mail – This is where I dump my spam, e-mail chain letters and any other e-mail that is of no value to me. Generally speaking this is my spam folder.
Up front this may seem like a whole bunch of extra work just to answer e-mail. The hardest part is setting up the system and working with it. Once you get it going however you time savings is clearly evident. I have found I am more productive answering my e-mails this way. It has greatly reduced me stopping in the middle of something to answer an e-mail. Not completely however because there are times when after a phone call or something I am expecting an e-mail that require immediate attention. I have found the time it saves as well as the distraction it prevents to greatly increase my productivity.
Tell me your suggestions on how you deal with large amounts of e-mail.
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