It's a challenge that faces most of us; email and lots of it.
But how much time are we spending, or indeed wasting, on managing our inboxes?
At the weekend I responded to, acted upon, delegated and deleted as many emails as I could and reduced my mail count to a very pleasing 18 emails. It's not even noon on Tuesday and I've currently got 74 emails staring at me. It would actually be higher but I've been deleting and responding to as many as I could as and when they came in.
Whilst this technique seems the most efficient way of managing my emails, in reality it is probably very different.
Eagerness to provide quick responses and resolutions is the driver for this approach but if you take a moment to consider how much of an impact it is having on my time perhaps an alternate solution is required.
Plenty time management gurus encourage the "Deal with it tomorrow" approach; allocate a set time each day and deal with yesterday's emails only. Clearly, this allows you to focus non-email time on getting your non-email workload done. But are we really in a position where we could potentially ignore our inbox for 24 hours? Does that match with our customers' expectations?
How about we scan our inboxes for emails marked as high priority and deal only with those when we see them? But then do our customers always use this feature?
Perhaps a halfway-house solution is to allocate three windows per day to see to emails? We could do yesterday's emails from 09:00 to 10:00, the morning's emails from 13:00 to 13:30 and those of the afternoon from 16:30 to 17:00. Anything received after half four will wait till the next day.
Now, I appreciate you've read this blog post and I haven't provided you with a solution. I'm not even sure there is one. I'm more hoping that this post is food for thought and a subject on which you are interested on commenting.
For the meanwhile, I will continue mixing the "deal with it now" approach with allocating set windows for email management as I see fit.
I look forward to your own thoughts on this subject by the way of comments.
I discuss some of this in my post:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.soulsailor.co.uk/2010/03/fear-of-linchpin.html
I recently did a similar exercise of culling the inbox and I'm now a week and a half in my "new world" of being 1 Outlook Screen or less of email .
I think I achieve this by:
Culling at the ends of the day
Email is categorised by:
1. For Info so goes straight into the project, client, initiative folder = FILE
2. Not relevant / no value = DELETE
3. That leaves me with only stuff in my inbox that absolutely needs a RESPONSE (not necessarily via email) i.e. I many need to do something, ring someone, document, SharePoint, IM etc) - but only if I am adding value
Hope that helps.. seems to be working so far!