subject: Email Management Tips To Increase Your Productivity [print this page] How many emails are currently stored in your in-box? It is not unusual to have few hundred to a few thousand emails in the inbox. Some of them are read and left in the in-box, other emails are unread and still lying in the in-box.
Have you ever thought why do we have so many emails? I observed one of our clients, checking his email, first thing in the morning. He opened the latest email from the top of his in-box. He read it and closed it back without doing anything. He then opened a few more emails read them and closed them back. I asked him - why do you open and read your emails - but do nothing about them and then close them back? He said he will deal with those emails later. I asked him - if you are going to deal with them later, why did you open it those emails the first place! You should have read yours emails later - when you were going to do something about it. Many of us are guilty of reading emails from our in-box and then leaving them in the in-box- without really doing anything with them. It is easy to see that if we keep doing this, pretty soon we will end up with hundreds, even thousands of emails in our in-box.
There is now almost unlimited space available for email storage - so space on your computer is not a problem. Your laptop or desktop occupies the same space and weighs the same whether you have zero email or thousands of emails in your inbox. However having thousands of emails in your in-box occupies a lot of mental space as they represent unfinished work, and hence diminishes your ability to focus and concentrate.
So how do we resolve this issue? It is quite simple. We have to learn handle each email only once. When we open and email, we have make a decision about it, immediately. We should never open an email, read it, and then close it back, without making a decision and doing something about it. Here is how to go about making decisions to go through your emails quickly.
There are two kinds of emails - the ones that require no action on your part and the ones that do require you to do something about it. The non-actionable emails are called reference emails. They dont represent any work that you have to do, but you may need to refer to it later. For example: the email attachment from your HR department about your companys HR policy update. You don't really have to do anything with it - but you would like to refer to it - in case you needed to check how many sick leaves are allowed as per your company policy. All non-action emails can be moved to a separate folder created in your in-box - named "reference". The search functions of most email program make it very easy to find the right email from your reference folder - through various search queries and their combination.
For the emails that require action, there are only four things you can do with them. Those four actions are represented by 4D's as listed below -
1. Delete - Delete obvious junk and report spam. Unsubscribe from mailing lists. Instead of spending time in deleting junk emails week after week, reporting spam will stop them from entering your in-box. Don't allow junk emails to enter your system at all.
2. Do - This step is critical to overcome procrastination and get in to the habit of clearing small tasks out of your way - quickly and efficiently. Anything that takes less than a few minutes (let's say 2 minutes for the sake of simplicity), should be completed it right away.
3. Delegate - If the work that the email represents can be done by someone else - by all means- delegate it to them. But make sure to track it via reminders. Or else they may forget about the delegated task and you may end up doing it yourself at the last moment.
4. Defer - After you have gone through the steps above, the emails left in your in-box are not reference emails, are not junk, cannot be done in 2 minutes or less and cannot be delegated. These emails represent the tasks that you need to do yourself - but not now - they will be done later. Move all such emails into a separate folder called My Tasks.
By following this simple method - you will easily tackle 75- 80% of your emails very quickly. You will then move the rest of the 20-25% of the emails into your My Tasks folder, which is where all your real work lies. Tackling your email in this manner, twice a day, will allow you to go through all your emails and get your in-box to zero on a daily basis. Then you can single mindedly focus on and start doing your real work from the emails in your My Tasks folder. And you will get your email in-box to zero every day!
