Chapter 10
Controlling Email Overload
In This Chapter
Some of you may receive less email because you communicate more on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Others of you may have gotten so frustrated with more email and spam that you vow to dramatically cut the volume of your email however you can. Whichever category you fit in to, this chapter helps you reduce, remove, and reclaim your email box.
Managing Email Effectively
If all the email correspondence you've ever received, sent, saved, responded to, forwarded, and deleted were turned into paper mail, your output alone could probably fill a U.S. Postal Office. Of course, you don't keep it all, but if you're like me, you let your email accumulate at times, perhaps until your system notifies you that your mailbox has exceeded its limit.
A good tool is only as good as the person wielding it. If you know how to use email properly, it can make your productivity output hum. If not, you can end up sabotaging your efforts to get things done. This section helps you rein in the all-too-often unwieldy paperless communication system.
Setting up filtering systems
Even militant time masters can lose hours of productive time to email — and much of that email isn't even work-related. Sometimes it's not even something you want to receive, yet you still have to dig your way through the sludge to see what the email is regarding.
Spam is only one factor that adds to the deluge of email you find in your inbox on a daily basis. If you're like most people, you probably authorized or even requested most of the promotional email you receive. Here are some tips to slow the flow of spam and other incoming email that clutters your inbox:
- Unsubscribe from newsletters or mailing lists that you no longer read. When you were starting up your organic garden last spring, a weekly email about composting tips seemed like a great idea. Now you find that you almost always delete it without opening. Time to put that idea to bed.
- Think twice before signing on for new mailing lists. You may appreciate a monthly newsletter about one of your hobbies. But instead of bulking up your inbox, why not add the website to your Favorites list and visit when it's convenient for you?
- When ordering online, seek out the check box that confirms your agreement to receiving email — and uncheck it. Called the negative option response, many merchants include a box on the order form that indicates, “Yes, I want to receive regular notices about your company's special offers.” That box is already checked off, for your “convenience.” In order to get nothing, however, you have to take action and get rid of that mark.
- When visiting or leaving personal or contact information on a website, always check the privacy policy to confirm that your information won't be sold. You can usually find a link to the privacy notice at the bottom of the web page or next to where you enter your information.
- Install spam-filtering software on your computer. Remember, though, that these programs typically don't remove the spam; they simply filter it to your junk folder so you can review or simply delete it.
Don't ever respond to spam. You may hope that your polite request to remove you from the mailing list will stop the mailings, but most often the opposite happens. Your reply confirms that your email address is a valid one. You may start getting even more email, and your address may be sold to other annoying spam-senders. Clicking an opt-out link can also put you at risk if the email is spam, so let your spam software do its job and leave it at that.
Separating Your Work and Private Life
It's important (and healthy) to keep your home and work lives separate. And one way to do that is to create different emails for your job and your personal correspondence. Setting up email accounts through services like Gmail is easy and enables you to have all personal emails, newsletters, and store offers sent to a specific personal account.
Just about every email service or software (such as Outlook or Thunderbird) has ways to filter all the mail you receive. Check each one for the steps necessary to make sure you see the mail you want, and reroute the spam and other unwanted mail. This is a timesaver for both your personal and work lives.
Managing multiple email addresses
You might think that using multiple emails can exponentially create frustration and confusion. If done correctly it can be a huge timesaver. It takes a little upfront design time and organization of what email to use with different people and offers.
I don't recommend forwarding all emails from different email address to one central warehouse location for email. I see many people do this, but it really defeats the purpose and efficiency of using multiple addresses in the first place. It does allow you to easily leave one of your email addresses behind if you or a sender gets hacked or the address gets sold off to a spammer.
If you are an executive, key decision maker, or entrepreneur, marketers and salespeople are targeting you. You are the big fish they want to land as an account. If your email address is posted on your website or can easily be figured out by looking at all the others posted on your or your company's website — you know what I am talking about, such as [email protected] — you are bound to get a volume of solicitation emails on a regular basis. I can't tell you how many emails a day I receive to [email protected], but I know it's a lot! Those emails route to my key staff members directly. They review them, respond as necessary, and forward the ones that require my direct attention. But I have a “secret” email that only my best clients and key strategic partners have access to. This enables me to save large amounts of time when it comes to reading and responding to emails.
Organizing and storing email
Managing, organizing, categorizing, and filing your email is a practice that can serve you much like maintaining a well-organized paper filing system. Many of your email messages are probably important to you as reference, especially business correspondence. And you, like me, have probably searched in vain for that important email you know you received, oh, maybe eight months ago.
Fortunately, you don't have to print off every email and stick it in a filing cabinet. Your email program includes many valuable tools that help you keep information as close as the click of a mouse. Most email programs include various folder and filing systems that serve as a virtual lateral file cabinet — but searching and finding what you want is a lot easier with just a little experience. You can sort and store your email by a number of categories, grouping them by sender, date, project, importance, or subject. Here are just some ways you can use the features your email service or software provides:
- Set up so that certain messages — periodic newsletters, for example — automatically route to a specific folder. (This tool works on the same concept as spam blockers, except these items go in a folder you actually want to see.) With the help of filtering software, you can flag specific email addresses and automatically send them to a folder — or even delete them — before they hit your inbox. I find that most people use only a small portion of what their filtering features can do. Take a few minutes to explore your options — filtering takes very little time to set up.
- Create a new-arrivals folder, defining new as a day, a week, or whatever you determine.
- Establish a dump folder that you clean out once a month or as often as you choose.
Don't look at all the email in the dump folder before you dump them. That takes too much time. You've filtered them enough to be able to let them go.
- Make specific project folders where you can save relevant email, providing a record of all conversations for the future. When you no longer need the file because the project is long completed, you can delete it. This setup also presents a great backup system.
- Employ the search function to track down any correspondence about a certain topic. For example, if you're looking for an email outlining details for a trip to the Bahamas, you can type “Bahamas” in the search field and all inbox email with Bahamas somewhere within the body or subject line will come up.
Responding to email using less time
There are days where I receive hundreds of emails. This is after the filtering techniques I shared with you earlier. (And even after using a double-secret-probation email as well.) Receiving only what you need to deal with is only half the battle. You must be able to create a system that shrinks the response time and investment if you still get a large volume of emails.
If you are set to craft a long email response, ask yourself if it could be quicker to pick up the phone and place a call. You can talk faster than you can type. If you don't need documentation of the correspondence, you might be able to shave half the time off by calling and speaking rather than writing out an email.
The other option is sending a voice text or video email. I love video email! It saves time and improves the quality of the communication. If you have a webcam you can create video email quickly using a service like BombBomb. In less time than it takes to craft a medium-length email you can record the video in BombBomb. While it's finishing the processing of the video you can craft the short text subject line, cut and paste the email address to send it to, then hit the Send button. The message has more impact, and it took less time.
When responding to a long email with many questions and points of clarification, create an opening greeting at the top of the email and then instruct the person that your responses follow in red, or blue, or whatever color you choose. This enables you to avoid scrolling up and down when you craft your response and allows you to refer to the question because it's on the screen right in front of you.
Employing an email response system
During my formative years, I watched the TV show M*A*S*H with my family. I remember that when the wounded would come into the medical unit, the doctors would perform triage, the process that determined patient priority. Does this wound need medical attention now? Will this soldier die without immediate care? Will this one die even if he receives attention? In this way, the medical team could most efficiently prioritize their work in a situation of chaos.
Performing triage is an excellent way to approach your email responses. Some mail you get is dead on arrival; other messages are of interest to you but not critical to address immediately; and others need your attention right now. When you receive 100 or more new messages a day, you need a good email management system.
Here's what works for me: When I open up my mailbox, I resort to the three Ds: delete, do it, or defer. Every email fits into one of these categories.
Hit the delete
Although your computer doesn't take up any more space if you have 10 or 10,000 emails, the clutter of useless, obsolete, irrelevant correspondence in your inbox can seem like a mile-high stack of stuff you have to carry with you.
Keep your inbox clean by discarding any email that's unimportant or long-obsolete. As for the advertisements, forwarded jokes, or urban myths, and the string of thanks, you're-welcome, have-a-good-day, see-you-after-work correspondence, read them (or don't) and delete immediately.
Also delete without opening any email with a subject line that seems too good to be true or seems like a marketing pitch from an unknown sender. How realistic is it to think that some company has sought you out to offer you an opportunity to make millions? And if a deal is really so incredible, would the advertiser really need to tell you that? Probably not. Beware of any email with subject lines containing misspelled words or words with symbols in place of letters (such as Fr** Mon!y). Spammers do this to try and bypass spam filters.
Knowing how to delete helps everyone in your company. When employees share a network, the server fills up when everyone retains all email, which can stop the flow of inbound email for the whole company. Most networks establish a limit to the size of individual inboxes and send notices when you get close to the limit. Then it's time for some major housecleaning. Better to keep up with the cleaning rather than let it build up.
Just do it
Just down the street from my high school in Portland, Oregon, is the headquarters of Nike, the company that coined the phrase “Just do it.” That's not bad advice for email management, either. Of course, this do it response is critical if the matter is urgent or must be done today, but it's also a sound strategy for most other email, too. If a message warrants a response, do it. Now. Answer the question. Forward the message. Transfer the to-do to your task list or schedule. Send a response. If you need little more than a click or a minute or two to respond, file, or forward, then don't waste time by keeping it for later.
Just as with mail or papers in your inbox, the best strategy is to handle it once (see Chapter 5) and then get it off your plate.
Defer until later
For those email messages that aren't critical-care matters, it may make sense to set them aside to address after you pass through all your correspondence. So you don't forget and leave them buried in your inbox to be remembered too late, immediately place these email messages in an appropriate folder so they'll pop up later for your attention. Messages that fall into this category may include personal email that you want to read carefully and to which you want to take time to craft a response. They can also include flexible-timeline projects that don't have to be done today or even this week.
Actually, I just thought of a fourth D: delegate. It falls in the defer category. Although you can simply click the Forward button and send the message along with instructions for carrying out the requested action, the reliability of email is suspect enough that you want to remind yourself to follow up if you hear nothing back from the delegate.
Automating your responses
The ability to plan ahead with email communication saves you loads of time. If you regularly field the same FAQs numerous times during the week or day, it may make sense to craft template emails of standard responses. Place these templates in a folder where you can easily access them, and you're ready to cut and paste your reply, using the form language and making personal tweaks as necessary. For example, if you get queries from clients about the status of their projects, you may put together a standard response informing them that you're attending to their project and will get in touch with them by such-and-such a date.
Don't forget about the automated message function when you're out of the office. Set up a message with the pertinent details: when you'll return, whether you'll be checking email, when people can expect to hear from you, and who they can contact if they need immediate assistance.