e-biz
putting the 'e' into business
Monday 7 April 2008, 9:15 PM
‘Spring Clean’ Your Inbox
An overloaded Inbox is something we can all relate to. But do you have an effective way to process and organise your e-mail so that you can get to an empty Inbox on a routine basis? No, I didn’t think so. If you have lots of e-mail in your Inbox - I know people with as many as 5000 messages - you might want to rethink your processing methods. Really, it is possible to empty your Inbox. The key is to evaluate how you are processing and organising your e-mail and make some changes.
No doubt you’ve opened an e-mail and thought, ‘Hmmm, not sure what to do with this. I'll deal with it later!’ - and promptly closed the message. If you do this over and over again, it doesn’t take long to end up with several hundred (or thousand) messages in your Inbox. Trust me... Without sounding like I’m preaching to the converted, developing a new approach to processing your Inbox will help you to gain more control, improve your response time, and keep up with critical actions and due dates.
You should also think about a spring clean, and now is as good a time as any. Junk mail can easily clutter the important information necessary for your job. Market research firm Gartner estimates that a company of 10,000 employees suffers more than £7 million worth of lost productivity because of internally generated spam.
Your goal should be to start the day only with new mail in your inbox. If you currently have hundreds of e-mails in your box, take a moment to picture those as hundreds of pieces of snail mail on your desk. How many hidden opportunities and risks are hiding in that electronic heap? But spring cleaners can take heart. Here are 10 tips to help overcome the burden of an overflowing Inbox:
1. Send short, clear messages and train colleagues to do the same
2. Send messages in the subject line whenever possible
3. Establish a full signature block with all of your contact information to insert in each e-mail and insert your full name and company identification in the ‘from field’
4. Establish folders for key clients and activities
5. Create a casual reading folder for electronic newsletters and similar subscriptions
6. Learn to use your e-mail system’s filters, blocking and rules tools effectively
7. No white space left in your e-mail ‘in-box’ should trigger the following e-mail processing actions: delete, forward or reference/archive
8. Rename subject line with a pertinent term so that processing and filing the message is easier for both you and the recipient
9. DO NOT send ‘inspirational’ e-mails
10. Think before hitting REPLY-ALL and recognise that e-mail is public and forever.
Too many people seem to be trapped in the combination of multitasking and technology. By using these practical techniques, important opportunities or hidden risks should not be lost.
PreviousComments on this post
People in bussiness who have 5000 emails, and i can tell you lots of people do, seem to think that it is neccessary and that on our Mail Servers we have infinate amount of Disk space to store everyone in the companies 5000 emails.
As an Administrator you could set quotas infact you must make that your normal pratice, but all that will happen is Users call up to say
User: "i've run out of space I cant send or receive any more Emails"
Admin: "I can increase your Quota slightly but are you sure you need all 5000 emails."
User: "Yes there all of vital importance"
Now who are you as an administrator to stand in the way of Vital importance for the Business. Only thing is Half the mail is not needed for example in the mail file some are correspondence between them and us in IT. And Secondly Its so disorganized good luck trying to find an E-mail if you need it.
Good advice maybe i'll forward it to my companies employees.
You're right Chris, it's very hard to manage employees' e-mails in terms of what they need and what they don't. Again, I think a large part of it comes down to educating the workforce to implement the tips I gave above. If everyone - it's hopeful I know - acted upon them then inboxes wouldn't be so 'overflowing' and a company's resources wouldn't be so stretched.
