October 25th, 2007
Taking Control of your Email
Email. We all get it, and sometimes we all get far too much of it. Awhile ago, I sat in front of my computer with my email open and stared, rather stupefied, at the number of emails in my various Inboxes (I have a number of emails for different things). 402. 16 Unread. 640. 34 Unread. 137. 5 Unread. Jesus. Where do you begin? How do you start to even process that? That was when I implemented a little “Getting Things Done” action and now my emails aren’t quite as scary. For those who may be in that sort of email hell, this may help you:
1. First create some folders for your email account. If you have multiple email accounts, set these folders up for each account. I would suggest the following:
_Action
_Waiting
Archive
Hold
(I add the underscore on Action and Waiting so that those folders are placed above any other additional folders)
For my business account, I also have the folder Clients with individual sub-folders within this for all my clients. If a client has multiple projects, I take that a step further and create a folder for each project.
2. Now, you need to spend some time going through your Inbox. We want to get to a point where your Inbox is empty. Yes, empty! This doesn’t mean that everything is done and all your emails are responded to - no doubt that will take much longer to do - but this is just to get things organised.
So, going through your Inbox from most recent, sort through each email following these guidelines:
a. Is the email something you need to do something about? You need to decide if you need to take action on something with the email, if it can be deferred to someone else who should handle it or if you can just delete it.
b. If you do need to take action and it is something that can be responded to or completed in 2-3 minutes, do it now. Get it out the way. If it is going to take longer than 2-3 minutes move this to your _Action folder. You’ll get to it later.
c. If you are waiting on something before you can respond to this or take action on it, move this to your _Waiting folder.
d. If this is something for someone else to handle, forward it to them now. If you know you will need to follow up on it, move it to your _Waiting folder as well.
e. If this is something that you may need in the future - some sort of reference email, but doesn’t require any action - move it to the Hold folder.
f. If this is something that you want to keep just for posterity, move it to the Archive folder. An example of how I use the Archive folder is once I have completed a project for a client, I take their entire folder I have under Clients and move it to Archives.
g. If the email is something you don’t need at all (another forwarded bad joke from Aunt May perhaps?) delete it.
Once you have sorted through your Inbox you are going to feel like a million bucks! No, really. It may take some time, but it will be well worth it when that Inbox is empty and items are all in their right place. Yes, that _Action folder may be bulging with stuff to do, but at least you know where those items are and you can tackle them when you have the time and energy. To make sure this system works, you need to follow-up with steps 3 and 4 below though.
3. At the end of every day give yourself an hour to empty your Inbox following this same procedure. Close up for the day with an empty Inbox. It can be difficult to find the time during a hectic day, so if you miss a day, don’t fret simply make this your first task the following morning.
4. Review your _Action and _Waiting folders during this time. Is there anything pressing that you need to get done first thing tomorrow? Perhaps you need to send off a quick email to someone reminding them about something you are waiting on? This should be a daily action.
A few additional tips:
- Setup an email account with Gmail or Yahoo for all your newsletter sign ups. All those emails can go to one spot and not interfere with your important emails. If you decide to use Gmail (and I would recommend it) setup filters so that any emails from a specific newsletter or mailing list will automatically go to a folder created for just that.
- If you are on any Google Groups or other mailing lists be sure to set your preference on receiving those emails as 1 daily or weekly digest rather than every single email being sent to you immediately.
- That being said, remove yourself from any lists you are no longer interested in. Why get extra email that you are just going to delete anyway.
- Make sure you have good spam filtering on. Many email clients nowadays have “learning” methods for spam, so if you do get a spam item in your Inbox, don’t simply delete it, mark it as spam first. Also, be sure to setup a Junk folder so all items marked as “spam” by either the email client or you will go into this folder. That way, any items the client picks up will automatically go here rather than disturbing your lovely organised Inbox, but often good emails sometimes end up being mis-labeled as spam and you can double check the folder so you don’t “lose” any emails.
- When you signup for something new, only select to be signed up for the newsletter if you really are interested in it. Otherwise, you’ll be getting a lot of unwanted emails.
I now look at my Inboxes and am not quite so overwhelmed. 3 Unread. 5 Unread. 0 Unread. Although, admittedly my _Actions folder is a little on the scary side, but one step at a time right? This method has been working well for me, but what suggestions do you have for keeping control of your email? How do you manage the mass of emails that flood your Inbox?
