Own Your Time Back by Organizing Your Email
If you’re getting too much e-mail or it’s taking too many hours of your day to respond to it, maybe somebody isn’t using the e-mail system in the manner in which it was intended. So let me ask you a question:
How much time would you spend reading and responding to these messages if they had been sent to you the old-fashioned way, on paper?
Would you be in such a hurry to respond to them and get them off your desk? Would you drop everything and deal with them immediately? Of course not! In the old days, these types of paper memos could sit in your in-box for days, if not weeks, before you got around to them, and the world didn’t come to an end.
But because the same message is now being sent to you electronically, you feel this primal urge to read and respond to it immediately. But are you in such a hurry to read your e-mail messages because they’re so very important, or because you know that if you don’t get to them regularly, they will just back up on you and eventually overwhelm you? Here are some tips on how to cope with the e-mail onslaught:
1. Set aside specific times during the day to go through your e-mail to see what’s arrived and what’s important. Don’t interrupt yourself every time an e-mail message arrives.
2. If it’s not necessary for you to respond to each and every e-mail message that you receive, don’t!
3. When you must respond to an e-mail message, make your response short and sweet. Give “Yes” and “No” answers when possible. If you have to write a few sentences or paragraphs, make them concise and to the point.
4. If you’re getting copied (cc) or blind copied (bcc) e-mail messages that don’t specifically apply to your job or daily responsibilities, ask the people who have been sending these messages to take you off their lists.
5. Delete unnecessary e-mail immediately.
6. If an e-mail message becomes a to-do item, immediately note it on your Master List.
7. Don’t allow the arrival of e-mail to interrupt your important work. If your computer beeps or sounds a trumpet to announce the arrival of each new e-mail message, then turn this feature off. And if your computer’s hard drive starts making all sorts of whirring noises whenever you get an e-mail message, you may want to turn off your e-mail as well.