Another effective solution to handle the email backlog
Posted by lemiffe in Communication, Learning, Misc, Technology on May 10th, 2010 | 0 commentsA few months ago I posted a solution for handling large quantities of email.
A few of those tips were: You must organize your inbox, archive items, separate them into tags/categories/labels, use filters to direct incoming mail into specific labels instead of receiving everything in the inbox. That reduces the clutter and allows you to focus on more important email first. (i.e. I redirect all newsletters to a ‘Newsletters’ label and automatically set them to ‘Read’).
One thing I mentioned previously was getting straight to the tasks and answering all email before starting with other work. This gets your mind off the issue of ‘pending mail’ and allows you to concentrate fully on other tasks. However, sometimes this is not that easy as there might be certain emails you must spend more time on, and you might need to get busy with other things at that moment.
My solution for this issue is to start a new reply to every single email you plan to address in the course of the day. Add a salutation, and save the message. In certain emails where you might have to formulate a proper answer you might want to do a sketch; type in the main topics and then just save it as a draft like the rest. Do this for all your pending email and then get them off your inbox.
That way you will have peace of mind that you have started the replies, and you can get down to other matters knowing that your inbox is now clean.
Do you have any special way of managing your inbox? Share your comments,
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