Week 2 then of our “How do you control your e-mail” series.

How did you do with the Week 1 approach?  I do hope you used it and kept practicing it throughout the week.  Now we shall look at:

• Empty your in box – everything should have its own place, and the inbox is not it!
• Decreasing  your response time – The One Minute Rule
• Craft effective messages
• Highlight Messages sent directly to you
• Use disposable e-mail addresses
• Master message search
• Future-proof your e-mail address
• Consolidate multiple e-mail addresses
• Script and automate repetitive replies
• Filter low priority messages

We don’t emerge from the womb with any natural talent for handling hundreds of e-mails.  We have to pick it up along the way, so, at the start of this series, the aim was to get fiddling around with e-mails down to about 30 minutes a day.  Anything more than that is usually waste activity.  To do that will require a menu of handling approaches – there is no magic wand to the problem that is e-mail volume!

” How do you decrease your response time?”

The One Minute Rule features heavily this week. If a message takes less than one minute to process, do it on the spot.

That doesn’t sound like much time so it is perfect for batch processing.  Whats batch processing?  Well, we do it in other areas all the time.  Think about Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds.  We keep an eye on the flow in those channels easily, so lets use that technique for our e-mail in box too.  The One Minute Rule is perfect for processing all those “Thankyou”, ‘Lets discuss”, “sounds good’ kinda messages.  You’d be amazed how many messages you can delete or file in the “hold” file you set up last week in a batch of, say, 10 minutes.  Schedule 2 or 3 batches of 10 minutes with your in box each day – don’t be a slave to the ping every time a new mail arrives – in fact, turn it off!

Touch a message once and commit to taking action there and then. There and then action is:

• delete it
• respond immediately
• file in either the “hold” for response in next day (urgent) or in “follow-up” for response in next few days (Important)
• archive it and make a phone call by way of action – this is usually if it’s too large a job to do there and then.  The phone call sets up the boundaries of the task with a who, what, where, when, how conversation with the sender. Handling e-mail efficiently means you really do have to talk to colleagues much more than you do now!!!

Good luck with this week’s technique and as always, let us know  how it goes.  But above all, do it as well as Week 1’s approach which should, by now, be second nature 🙂

The last few weeks we’ve been looking at personal behaviour change in relation to working differently.  Clearly the desire is there to do things differently so is it the environment or “the system” that is stopping us ultimately?

I thought we should focus on the beast that affects us all nowadays – email.  Love its simplicity but hate its ability to multiply before your very eyes?  Well you won’t be alone!

Recently, a recommendation in the comments section of  a blog referred to a book called: Lifehacker

Coincidentally, I actually had that book on my i-pad having liked its general approach to working smarter, faster and better, for a while.  It has simple, straightforward approaches, nothing is unattainable and some things are more suitable to individuals in the day job than others, so it offers choice in what you run with.  So it seems timely to look at a problem we will all have had at one time or another:

“How do you control your e-mail?”

Lifehacker outlines 10 ways to get on top of an overfull in-box.  We will look at them separately, and I ask you to choose carefully the ones you want to try, but above all, stick with it and be disciplined in your adoption of your chosen approaches.  The 10 approaches are as follows:

• Empty your in box – everything should have its own place, and the inbox is not it!
• Decrease  your response time
• Craft effective messages
• Highlight Messages sent directly to you
• Use disposable e-mail addresses
• Master message search
• Future-proof your e-mail address
• Consolidate multiple e-mail addresses
• Script and automate repetitive replies
• Filter low priority messages

The beast called e-mail is so important, I think we will focus on an element a week.  If you have any top tips to add, please, please do so in the comments section.   The chapter on e-mail management suggests you can reduce the amount of time you spend fiddling with e-mail to less than 30-minutes per day.  That alone has to be worth the time it takes to read the chapter don’t you think?  So here we go with week 1, tackling the mammoth task of emptying that obese in box!!!

I personally love the three folder approach of:

• archive – longer term reference library – no subfolders, thats cheating!
• follow up – things that must be completed – if you use the Important/Urgent matrix, this folder is for things which are important
• hold – temporary holding pen for things you’ll need quick access to within the next day or so – again, if you use the matrix, then these are your Urgent things.  Although the chapter says review this folder weekly, I review mine daily, at the beginning of the day.

Top tips I use daily include:

• opening oldest messages first and delete irrelevances immediately
• if the action required will take more than one minute to do, move it to the follow up folder (end of the day review)
• I colour code with a rule, those messages from people who are my key customers or stakeholders, so I can be drawn to them instantly
• make a decision about the fate of every message you read at the time you read it. No excuses!

So, here endeth week 1 of “Managing E-mail”.  Whats your top tip?

As I sat on a train to Bristol, looking around me, I see many folk starting their working day, with the use of mobile devices. Equally, with the imminent arrival of the London 2012 Olympics, more and more of us are being encouraged to work from home. But how easy do you find working, often alone, either at home or on the move?

“How easy have you adapted to working on the go?”</

Share this:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email
• Facebook
• Print
• Pinterest
• Tumblr

Like Loading...