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Manage E-Mails Better with an Empty Inbox
Businesses rely on e-mail as a means of rapid and inexpensive
communication. E-mail is an
essential tool for both internal and internal messaging, but it can
become a serious problem if it isn’t managed well.
What’s often called ‘e-mail overload’ afflicts most businesses. People
spend too much time sorting through their e-mails; they retain too many
of them on their own PCs and generally waste too much time by failing to
cope with the volume. When you consider that the amount of e-mail
businesses receive increases by 50% or more each year, you can see that
the problem’s going to get a lot worse unless you do something about it
right now.
There are many things a business
can do to reduce the drain on company resources caused by improper
handling of e-mail. Most can be achieved by having – and enforcing, an
empty inbox e-mail policy for all team members.
Keep Inboxes Free of Clutter
An inbox that’s full of old e-mails takes time to sort through, can
cause important messages to be lost, and can even be a place where items
needing urgent attention can be ‘sidelined’.
e-mail is not a filing system, nor is an e-mail program a place to store
ongoing project work. It is there for receiving and sending messages.
When the clutter builds up in any part of it, especially the inbox, the
e-mail system becomes a labor-wasting device.
There are better bits of software to handle functions like document
archiving and keeping track of schedules and passwords to websites.
The only way to keep an inbox clutter-free is to handle every piece of
e-mail as soon as it’s received. Do whatever’s appropriate and don’t
allow the inbox to fill up with old e-mails. There are just three places
an e-mail should go after it’s been received, read and acted upon if
required: either file it, archive it or permanently delete it.
Start by Emptying your Inbox
There’s only one way to create
an empty inbox – ruthlessly! The first time will take a while and
challenge your decision making processes, but once you get the hang of
it, it gets a whole lot easier.
Begin the procedure by deleting any retained spam or frivolous messages.
Most offices circulate humorous e-mails to some degree and they’re
frequently saved in the inbox. If it has no business value, get rid of
it. The same applies to any personal messages. Read them, respond to
them and then delete them or save them somewhere else.
What about the rest of the items? Simple. Your e-mail program is a
communications tool and not a filing cabinet. Think of your how a filing
cabinet works and you’ll immediately have the idea. You can set up files
on your hard drive, or on the company’s server if that’s how your IT
system is set up, and put items that should be retained into those.
Anything that needs to be put on a calendar or schedule can go into a
separate program. Invoices go to accounts, white papers go into a file
called ‘white papers’, and photographs go into a file called
‘photographs’. e-mail is only the vehicle that carries things to you and
not a place where they should be stored.
Items that need action should either be acted on immediately or placed
into a separate file for follow up later. Leaving them in your inbox
until you take care of them is an invitation to lose them or to forget
about something that needs to be done.
For legal reasons many businesses are now required to archive all
internal and external communications, and in many jurisdictions these
include e-mails to and from the company. This may mean that copies of
incoming and outgoing e-mails are retained in a separate facility, in
which case this too will help relieve the burden on your e-mail program.
Inbox Procedure
Every time you access your inbox – at least twice a day, you should
proceed in the way outlined below. The aim is to take appropriate action
on every item without delay, then delete it. The goal is to always leave
the inbox empty when you leave the program.
1. Delete any spam or non-essential materials. If your spam filter has
let some advertising material through don’t bother reading it. Look at
the sender’s name and the subject line and spam’s easy to identify. If a
colleague has sent you something funny that you really have to see, view
it then delete it. Personal messages can be replied to, or simply read,
and then deleted.
2. The business-based e-mails (these are really supposed to be the only
things in the inbox to begin with, but we’re only human!) need to be
given due attention. Some items will only be informational –
newsletters, bulletins from industry websites, training course materials
and so on. These you can read and delete. If something requires action
you’ll make a note of it elsewhere.
3. Actionable e-mails should be acted on immediately whenever possible.
If a simple reply will handle the matter, compose a response as soon as
you read it and send it off. If it’s only going to take a couple of
minutes to handle, do it then delete the e-mail from the inbox. If it’s
going to take longer to prepare a response or handle it, make a note of
it elsewhere then delete the original e-mail.
Other Steps to Take
First, consider whether your firm requires its e-mails to be retained
for legal or other reasons. If so, create an electronic archive into
which copies of all e-mail communications can be directed and set it up
so it can be searched to retrieve specific pieces of communication.
This eliminates the need to retain ‘sent’ and ‘deleted’ e-mails on PCs
in the office, as well as providing a destination for storage of
‘received’ e-mails.
Don’t allow ‘deleted’ and ‘sent’ e-mails to build up on a PC. Set your
e-mail program to get rid of all ‘deleted’ e-mails each time you close
the program. If it’s necessary to retain a ‘sent’ e-mail on your own PC,
set a maximum period of time – say one month, for retention and
permanently delete all e-mails over that age when you do your e-mail
housekeeping.
This may sound simple, and it is, but it’s not easy. It takes time and
discipline to get used to this system. The option, however, is to try to
deal with an inbox that’s stuffed with hundreds of e-mails and wonder
which ones need attention and which can be cleared out. After a week or
two they all look the same. Keep the inbox empty and e-mails will cease
to be a problem.
What Next?
In recent years we’ve found that making the most of e-mail’s many
capabilities requires an ongoing investment in technology. Many
businesses have gone through more than one cycle of upgrading their
e-mail capabilities, most commonly to store the increasing volume of
material that needs to be retained for legal and commercial purposes.
Not surprisingly, a function of e-mail storage systems that’s gaining in
importance is the ability to search through the growing mass of stored
e-mails to locate specific items of correspondence. Developments in this
area mean you can archive e-mails and retrieve them if necessary; they
don’t have to be kept on office PCs.
It’s worth making the investment of a bit of extra time each day to keep
the inbox clear and ready for the next batch of arrivals. If we don’t do
this the growth in the number of e-mails we receive will eventually
overwhelm us and negate the gains we can obtain from this wonderful form
of communication.
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