So, you’re tired of getting bogged down by a flood of emails, and want more time to focus on your work?
While email has completely revolutionized the way we work, it also comes with nasty side effects.
Consider this :
“The average American employee spends about a quarter of their working day (around one and three quarter hours) dealing with email. Three out of ten spend more than two hours and almost one in ten (8 per cent) spend an astonishing four hours or more a day pouring over their inboxes.” via Management-Issues.com
We are copied on too many emails we don’t need to read. Our work is disrupted by emails that we feel we must attend to on the spot. We spend the whole day clearing emails when we return from a holiday, at times not knowing even where to begin.
Here’s my personal method of dealing with email overload in Outlook. The first lesson on email Zen is that “a clear inbox equals a clear mind “.
Get to ZERO Emails in Your Inbox in 6 Easy Steps
- All personal emails is moved to a seperate folder right away - to be read after work, or during a break.
- Sort all email by subject - so I can read all related emails at one go.
- Every work email that I can answer in less than 2 minutes - I do so, send it off on the spot, and delete it.
- Delete everything you don’t need to act on. Yes, everything.
- Everything else gets flagged, with reminder attached based on priority
- All flagged items gets dragged into a follow-up folder - out of sight, out of mind.
Repeat this process, and you’ll get to zero emails in your inbox in no time, allowing you to get focused on the important work right away.
Note: Email shouldn’t be permanently deleted, just let it sit in your ‘deleted items’ folder. Do not enable any options that will automatically empty your ‘deleted items’ folder upon exiting Outlook.
Part 1: Get to Zero Email In Your Inbox
Part 2: Working From Your Followup Folder
Part 3: Fine Tune Your Outlook Workflow
November 8th, 2006 at 11:18 pm
i keep all my work related emails, never deleted them. after the year ends i save the pst file and start a new one. that way i can keep track of econversations, and has rescued me on a few occasions.
November 9th, 2006 at 12:37 am
pinolobu: That’s exactly the reason for my note at the end of the article saying the email shouldn’t be permanently deleted, just let it sit in your ‘deleted items’ folder.
The idea is to get it out of sight, not to erase it completely. I’ve experimented with dragging email which requires no further attention to a separate folder, but hitting the delete button just makes it so much more efficient.
Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3. The whole process will all come together really soon :)
November 11th, 2006 at 8:55 am
Nice idea. I am going to give it a go. Just a warning shot for using “Deleted items” as a folder to store old emails. Some evil sys admins configure Exchange servers to empty the “Deleted items” after certain critria is met i.e. Delete mail after 7 days.
Just a word of warning ;o)
Many thanks
November 11th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Jason: Thanks for the tip, if your email resides permanently on your exchange server, then I would recommend you drag email into a separate folder rather than deleting them.
My email gets downloaded from my exchange server to my PC. So all email is controlled on the client side i.e. me.