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How To Manage Email At Work

If you were to look in your email inbox at work, how many emails would you find? 10? 100? Too many to count? How about 0?

One of my former managers routinely kept emails in his inbox. Every three months, at about the 5000 mark, or when he would run out of space on the server, he would delete everything. He figured anything really important would be resent. His excuse for letting it get that bad? “I don’t want to spend all day doing email.”

This does not have to happen. My email box at work is always empty, but I don’t spend all my time dealing with email as it comes in. I check email three times a day, process it, and get back to my real work. Here are my tips for managing email at work:

Handle Email Once Where Possible

Back in the early days of my pursuit of organization, I read a book called The Organized Executive: A Program for Productivity–New Ways to Manage Time, Paper, People, and the Digital Office (aff). In it, the author advocated handling each piece of paper once. While this is a nice thought, I found that this rule applied about 80% of the time for email. With 80% of my email, I can decide what to do with it, and do that action within 30 seconds. The rest of the email I slot into folders for more intense processing, which I tackle during my low-energy time right after lunch.

Here are the possible actions I take with email:

• File. This one I do immediately. If it is project related, I drag the email over to the windows folder related to the project.
• Trash. This is for any email that is not work-related, or that consists of “me too”.
• Respond. If I can answer in under a minute, I do it immediately. If I can’t, the email gets moved to the “Respond” folder and I deal with it after lunch.
• Action. Sometimes an email requires me to do something. If it is project related, I add it to the project folder. Next I decide if the action can be accomplished in under a minute. If not, I file it in the Action folder for later processing.

Setting Up Filters

I found that most of my 80% of my email could be handled by setting up filters. Filters allow you to automatically deal with certain emails by filing them, responding to them or trashing them. One former co-worker, blind to my repeated appeals that he stop sending me jokes, automatically has all his emails go into the trash. Copies of system reports sent to me as FYI get put into specialized folders so that I can track down problems if necessary. This step alone cut my email down from 50-60 messages every morning to less than 10.

Using Toolbars And Shortcuts to Speed Up Sorting

A recent modification I made to my work email (which is Outlook 2003) is to follow the suggestions in the Lifehacker article “Tweak Microsoft Outlook to Empty Your Inbox Faster”. I customized my toolbars so that all I have to do to move a message is select Alt-1, then use my arrows to select the folder. It saves me a world of time moving between mouse and keyboard.

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Photo by mirsasha

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