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Remember: There is no point in filing an e-mail or closing
an e-mail if you can complete it in less than 2 minutes.
Tips for Organizing e-Clutter
Note: these suggestions were NOT discussed in the show. For even more ideas, listen to e-Clutter!
• Limiting how much email you receive and send. Consider subscriptions on trial run basis then unsubscribe if not completely satisfied.
• Ask yourself 3 questions before hitting delete: Do I really need this (or is it really special to me)? Is there a legal reason I need to keep this? and Is this message the only place I can find this info?
• Can you delegate some of your emails? If you can, do it immediately. You should be able to compose and send the delegating message in less than two minutes. Once you delegate the email, delete the original message or move it into an appropriate folder.
• Keep responses short. Cut out unnecessary words and sentences. Address the essential - not everything warrants a response. Use paragraphs liberally. It’s easier to read, and makes your email more approachable.
• Cheat - Copy and paste answers to frequent email subjects. These "templates" let you create and use standard responses to the questions and requests to which you usually find yourself drafting identical replies over and over from scratch. At least use a template as a basis for your response, and then customize it for that person or situation.
Consider this: Generally you can delete about half of all the e-mail you get. But you're hesitant to delete messages for fear you might need them at some point. Ask yourself honestly: What percentage of information that you keep do you actually use?
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Email Overload: Taking The Overwhelm Out Of E-Mail
By Monica Ricci
“By the year 2000, we’ll have paperless offices.” Isn’t that what many people
were thinking and saying thirty years ago? Electronic mail came along and the
prediction threatened to come true of messages whizzing back and forth with no
paper involved. It was a technological dream come true. However, we’ve traded
one problem for another.
The ease of e-mail communication has created a new monster in the form of e-
mail overwhelm. Seventy-four new messages today, and it’s not even lunch time!
Chain letters which promise sure doom if you break them! Urban legends and
virus hoaxes ‘til the cows come home. It’s a never-ending stream of messages,
which can be hard to manage. Plus, adding insult to injury, the turn of the new
century has come and gone and we’re more inundated with paper than ever.
How can this be? What of the high tech, paperless workplace of our dreams?
Paper is a tried and true means of conveying information from one person to
another, and it often feels “safer” to rely on paper systems than to rely on
technology. This security blanket effect is the cause of e-mail paper clutter. One
reason so many people print e-mail is because they’re afraid if they don’t, that they’ll never be able to find the original message again. Using the steps outlined here, you should be able to rest easy knowing that you can locate a specific e-mail any time you need it, without worrying about printing it off and adding it to the pile on your desk.
The first logical first step to combating e-mail overwhelm is to have faith in your
technology and stop feeling compelled to print your e-mails. A good rule of thumb
is to only print an e-mail if it contains information that is absolutely necessary to
have with you in hard copy when you leave the office.
Consider the fact that when you print out your e-mails, you are defeating the
entire purpose of having electronic mail in the first place.
Another very obvious tactic to managing the flood of e-mail is to use the delete
key joyfully and use it often! There is absolutely no reason to waste time opening
e-mails that you have no interest in reading. SPAM -- jokes, chain letters, virus
hoaxes, and advertisements, are circulated millions of times a day and they are a
total waste of time. Nine times out of ten you can tell what is spam simply by the
subject line or the return address, so don’t even bother opening them.
Your e-mail program may also have filters that you can set up to redirect e-mails
with certain key words in the subject line or text body. For example, if you get a
lot of junk e-mail regarding contests, you could choose to flag any incoming e-
mail with the word “win” in its subject line. Once the software sees the key word,
it automatically directs that e-mail into the trash and you never even see it in your
inbox.
A technique you can use to reduce the download wait time on your e-mails is to
set your preferences within your e-mail client to only download messages that
are a certain size or smaller. I use a maximum setting of 15K (15,000 bytes),
which means I don’t automatically get any attachments unless I choose to
retrieve them from the server. Setting your preferences this way will allow you to
see the first few lines of a message, but will leave the bulk of it on the server for
you to retrieve, but only if you elect to. This little trick also keeps many viruses
from landing on your computer because you never download the attachments to
your machine.
Once you’ve chosen which e-mails to save, create various folders within the e-
mail program to sort and track the messages. If you have only one inbox and it’s
holding every e-mail from the past six months, you’re in “communication chaos”
and things are slipping through the cracks. When setting up sorting folders,
choose carefully what you name the folders, so that you remember what each
one means. You can create folders with project names, client names, sender’s
names, or the action needed to be taken. For example, create a folder called “to
be answered” for those e-mails that require a definitive reply from you. There are
many categories by which to sort your e-mails, and only you know which
categories and labels will be the most relevant and effective for you in your
business.
If you try the steps outlined here, you can take control of your e-mail overwhelm.
Once you set up a framework for organizing your e-mails, you’ll be amazed at
how quickly you can find what you need and more importantly, take the
overwhelm factor out of your electronic communication.
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