Muddling Through Your E-mail Inbox
Dreading your e-mail inbox? Although e-mail is regarded as a necessary communication tool of the twenty first century, it can become a productivity drain instead of a productivity gain. Here are some tips from Kaitlin Duck Sherwood to prevent too much of a good thing.

Tips for Overcoming Email Overload
by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood

• Recognize that your inbox is your to-do list. Think of it as such and treat it as such.
• Get spam out of your inbox. There are many good anti-spam software packages out there now. Your company should have one. If you don't - get one.
• If you are on an email list that is purely informational -- where messages never turn into "to-do" items -- use rules/filters to move the those messages to a subfolder. You can read them on some day when you don't have anything better to do.
• Get off of as many email lists as you can. Will the day come when you don't have anything better to do than to read that mailing list? If not, get off the list. If you can't figure out how to get off the list, use filters/rules to send those messages to the trash.
• Move messages out of your inbox when you no longer need to take read, respond to, or act upon a message. Don't beat yourself up about how you aren't filing your messages properly; just make a folder named "Done" and put all your "Done" messages there.
• If your email program allows it, put a button in the toolbar for moving the selected message(s) to a final resting place.
• Use rules/filters to prioritize your inbox. If possible, use rules to assign each message a category (or label) based on what group the sender belongs to. If you assign the categories so that they sort in the same order as their probable importance, then you can easily sort your inbox to list messages in roughly the order you want to deal with them.
• Save and reuse responses to questions that you get frequently.
• Write better messages:

  Discuss only one issue per message. People frequently forget about all but the first or last question, and thus you have to send/receive more messages to deal with the missing answer. Be sure to provide adequate context for your messages. Be particularly careful about pronouns in about the first three sentences: make sure it is absolutely clear what those pronouns are connected to. Make your emotional tone as obvious and explicit as you can. Use formal language and end messages with No Reply Needed to discourage responses. As much as possible, reply to only the sender instead of to everybody and use BCC instead of CC. Your correspondents then won't get inside conversations with each other that they copy you on.

• If someone you know sends you messages you don't want (like hoaxes or jokes), ask them very politely to stop. Otherwise, they will send you more.
• Read Overcome Email Overload with Microsoft Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2002.

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