Reining In The Reign Of E-Mail

Vast quantities of e-mail arrive in my in-box from a variety of sources. Students and colleagues at the college where I teach, clients, hockey affiliations and, of course, personal e-mails. I also get my fair share of junk e-mails. On any given day, I can receive anywhere between 40 and 200 e-mails of the kind that either carry important information, or that require a response.  Many active Internet users are in a similar predicament, some with much larger volumes of mail than I can muster. This is a lot of communication and it requires some thoughtful management, lest your in-box turn into a digital version of your kitchen junk drawer

I have three things to offer on managing incoming e-mails:

Maintain E-Mail Office Hours: Consider the actual legitimate urgency of most e-mails. Unless you are drumming your fingers on your desk, waiting for Jo to send you her latest draft so you can get your deadline met, most e-mail can tolerate a 12-24 hour response time. This means that you could choose two hours of your day – say an hour in the morning and an hour later in the day – to sort and respond to your messages. This means turning OFF all the visual and auditory notifications on your computers and mobile devices. It means not obsessively checking your e-mail every few minutes. It means a return to focus and productivity. Think of it this way – you wouldn’t get much work done if your phone rang every few minutes with non-critical information. Similarly, if your e-mail is vibrating your belt or pocket every few minutes, for no valuable reason, it will needlessly interfere with your concentration. Relax – you have set aside time to deal with whatever is coming in. Of course, the trick is to make sure that you actually maintain your office hours once you have set them.

Create Intelligent Folders: It isn’t enough to say “create folders and then sort your mail into them”. Lots of people create folders and then sort their mail into those folders. However, unless the folders have some kind of logic to them, this process may add to, rather than eliminate confusion and further detract from one’s productivity.

Here is what works for me: This system is based on sorting e-mail by sender. I have seen some people sort based on topic/subject/project however, for me, this would take too much time pondering which folder to put certain messages. After all, any one message might be “about” several things, yet it tends to originate from only one source.

So, to start, the highest level folders represent major activity areas of my life. In my case, a few of these are:

• College
• Business – Operations
• Business – Clients
• Friends
• Hockey

Under each, I start to build a sub-folder structure that makes sense. For example, under “college”, I create semesters by date. For each semester, I start fresh with sub-folders for each course I teach, then “colleagues”, “administration”, “technology” etc. Sometimes, I just let the folder structure build itself organically based on the e-mails I am receiving. Bottom line: if I can remember who sent me something, I’m only a few clicks away from retrieving it.

There is some cross-over. For example, some of my college colleagues are also “friends” – aren’t they lucky – they get two folders! One houses e-mails that are work-related, one stores e-mails of a more personal nature.

Similarly, if you are working on a specific team or committee and receive e-mails related to this specific work – no problem. Give that area of your life its own folder, too. In a way, you are still sorting based on origin. For example, I work with a web designer who has her own folder under my Business-Operations heading. However, when we are working on a specific project for a client, I create a new folder just to house e-mails related to that project. I am still sorting based on who sent the e-mail (the web designer and/or the client) but I can see all the related topical e-mails at a glance.

The objective here is to build a folder structure that will allow you to quickly retrieve information in a few clicks. Experiment a bit and find what works for you.

Triage Your E-Mail: Once you have a folder system/logic that will serve your purposes, let’s turn attention to what you actually do with the time that you have set aside for e-mail correspondence. Again, I will offer what seems to work for me:

• In-box: In an ideal world, this would be empty at the end of the day. In reality, I usually have 10-15 e-mails here that are waiting for me to take some kind of responsive action. I treat my in-box a bit like a “to-do” list. The only e-mail left in my in-box at the end of an ideal e-mail day represents something I need to make a decision about, or something that requires a lengthy response that I haven’t had time for.
  I want to emphasize this point. Get into the habit of examining each e-mail in your in-box at the end of your work day. Is it waiting for you to do something with it? If not, get it out of there! If a folder doesn’t exist to hold it, then it is time to create a new one. Over time, this practice will make dealing with your in-box ever so much easier.
• Junk Mail: There are many spam filtering agents out there that will, for a few dollars per month, do a reasonably good job at filtering out unsolicited e-mails. Most Internet Service Providers (the folks responsible for relaying e-mail to your in-box) also provide hosted solutions as part of their services. It would be worth an hour or so of your time to set up a spam filter, and another few minutes later on to tweak it properly based on its performance.
• Folders: I’m a bit of an e-mail pack rat. I save almost everything. I’d estimate that over half of the e-mail I receive is “FYI” only. It doesn’t require a response. For example, when I’m copied on a conversation between several members of a hockey team on which pub to meet at after the game, I can highlight several responses at a time and move them in one fell swoop. Here is where I’ve learned a useful trick. Most e-mail programs sort e-mail, by default, by date. The newest message will appear at the top. However, most e-mail programs will also allow you to sort your in-box by sender and also by topic. So, say you have exchanged several e-mails on the same topic and now the exchange is done. Provided the subject line has stayed constant, you can just click on the “subject” bar at the top of that column and, voila, all of the relevant e-mail appears in a stack that is easier to highlight and grab. The same principle applies to sorting e-mail by sender. This can really speed up the movement of bundles of e-mail into folders.
• Crisis Triage: Recently, I wound up in bed for a few days as a result of a virus. Classes were cancelled and I fretted over how we would ever get caught up on the missed time. Making matters worse, I lay in bed, knowing full well that my in-box would be filling up with student inquiries, as they would now be anxious about all manner of things – online quizzes, upcoming presentations, assignments, etc. When I finally managed to get in front of my e-mail program, I saw that my worst fears were realized. Furthermore, because all my e-mail is re-directed to one single in-box, student e-mails were mixed in amongst all the other incoming information. Yet, answering them in sequence was a priority.

  I created a new folder for this semester called “Respond ASAP”. As I was grabbing and filing the “FYI” e-mails from my in-box, I was also moving the student inquiries to the “Respond ASAP” folder. This took about 15 minutes, leaving me with a few dozen lower priority e-mails to deal with and a folder of high priority e-mails to focus on, in my cold-medicated, slightly dazed state. I sorted the high priority e-mails by date and started at the bottom. After each response, I filed the e-mail under the appropriate course heading. I found that tackling this problem in this manner helped me stay focused on the priority e-mails without getting distracted by the less critical e-mails that were also waiting for me.

  Another trick helped me save time here. I knew that several of the student inquiries would be quite similar, one to another. I opened a text file on my desktop and copied my first response into it. As the like-type inquiries appeared, I just did a “copy/paste” of the original response and tweaked it to suit the specific concern. There were several themes in the inquiries and I found myself, at the end of the exercise, with several paragraphs of recycled information in my text file. I then crafted this into a full-scale announcement, with headers, that I posted on our online course site. After all, if one student has a question about something, it means that 9 others also did but didn’t get it together to ask! I’m convinced that doing this cut down on the volume of student inquiries later in the week.

These are a few of the ways I try to rein in the reign of e-mail. What are your best e-mail tricks? Care to share?

Posted in Communication, Managing Technology, Time Management
Tags: e-mail, e-mail management, e-mail triage, in-box, in-box management, in-box triage