How to overcome e-mail overload
Stressed by e-mail? Is it controlling your life? Tim Burress, author of The Hamster Revolution, recommends the following top two strategies for overcoming e-mail overload:
• Cut e-mail time by 20 percent.
According to Burress, the average professional sends and receives 80 e-mails a day or 19,200 e-mails annually. And e-mail use is compounding at the astounding rate of 16 percent a year. Assuming it takes about two minutes to process the average e-mail message, each of us is spending nearly 80 days each year on e-mail. If we cut e-mail time by 20 percent, we can save ourselves 16 days a year.
So how does Burress recommend we do this? Send less and you’ll get less. First, ask yourself whether or not the end-user needs it. Is it timely, relevant and complete? Second, ask yourself if the message is appropriate before you send it. Is it compliant, professional and inoffensive? Third, ask yourself if the message is targeted. Use “reply all,” distribution lists and carbon copies sparingly.
• Boost e-mail quality by 35 percent.
E-mail quality challenges include vague subject lines, e-mail that requires clarification and e-mail where the action is buried in the message.
Good e-mails are both professional and recipient-focused. To boost your e-mail quality, first strengthen the subject line. Make it clear and descriptive. Second, sculpt the body. Start with a brief, warm greeting, followed by the action/summary (specific action, purpose and response time), the background (clear, concise and relevant with bullet points, numbers and bold paragraph titles) and the close (signature).
My question to you is this: Do you control e-mail or does e-mail control you? What is your chief complaint about managing e-mail? What strategies have helped you overcome e-mail overload?
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Comments
I didn't prioritize this over other sessions but I am always fascinated by how we use/are used by the email tool. As we keep looking for 'the answers' on how to maximize social media, I suspect many of the clues to how our members react to it and use it lie in how we have been using email for the past 15(ish?) years. Comparing being a consultant vs. an association staffer, I now have far fewer emails and they are much more predictable, although I have a few collaborators & friends who do write short messages incessantly. So I have a library of ongoing chatter that I really should delete (but need to refer back to for project histories and the like) but they have the same issues of vague subject lines.
My 'strategies' are pretty idiosyncratic to me although they're the same rules I followed as an associaton exec:
1) Create folders into which I dump recent correspondence (anything over a month old) and feed for 3-4 months before closing it and opening a new folder. The goal for me is to archive much older messages safely without deleting them, as something that happened 12 or 24 months ago often crops up again and I need the history somewhere. My goal is to have a relatively clean looking inbox.
2) Periodically feeding a folder for a specific major project so the entire history is easy to review and it doesn't clutter up my inbox.
3) Being sure to detach file attachments from emails immediately and resaving them. That way my Outlook datafile (.pst) doesn't grow enormous and index speed remains fast even when I keep 35,000 active emails.
4) Never using auto-preview panes so I can see the big picture. If the subject line is vague or unclear, I click on key messages, alter the subject line (in uppercase) and resave so I know which message in a thread (or an ASAE listserv digest) really matters.
Posted by: Kevin Whorton | August 20, 2009 7:25 AM
I must check out that book, Aaron. Love your approach Kevin!
This is a topic near and ear to my heart. I've been teaching whole workshops on it - but called "Information Coping Skills" to keep it positive.
Here's my wiki
http://informationcoping.wikispaces.com
And recently, it was Information Overload Awareness Day -- good time to reinforce these good habits!
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/information_coping_skills/
Posted by: Beth Kanter | August 20, 2009 11:11 AM