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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Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.