Ask an Expert: Buried in email? Learn how to tame it
— -- Q: Steve — With your work as a business speaker and a Q and A columnist, I bet you get inundated with e-mails. Have you come across any good solutions for dealing with a perpetually full inbox? — Rick
A: I feel your pain brother, that's for sure. In the past year I have more and more found myself saying, "I feel like I do email for a living" and I don't say it is a good way.
Death by email is not a pleasant experience.
Now I am not here to say email is evil or even bad. It's great. Really, it is, I swear. I mean that! Well, mostly, I guess.
But I recall the time when I was about 10 years old and taking a walk with my sweet grandfather. He always used to counsel me, "Moderation in all things Stevie. Too much of anything is bad for you."
Thinking I had him that day, I said, "But you can't have too much milk, right Pop?" "Yes," he said, "even too much milk is bad for you."
I am not alone when I say that for many of us, we are full to the brim with the milk that is e-mail. Too much of it is a bad thing.
So what do you do, how do you handle the never-ending avalanche of email? Here are five solutions:
1. Declare e-mail bankruptcy. This is a fairly recent phenomenon, and certainly an understandable one, albeit pretty bold as well. The idea here is that when your inbox gets so full that you either are looking at emails that have been sitting there for, say, a year, or there are so many unopened and unanswered emails that you just can't see a way out, you simply delete them all and start over.
If you choose this fairly radical solution, it is good form to at least send out a mass email, letting people know what you are doing and asking them to re-send their email if it is truly important.
2. Schedule it. Emails that I get that are important enough to answer but not urgent enough that they need an immediate response will sit in my inbox for up to a week, when I then sit down for a few hours and catch up.
An alternate solution is to mostly leave your inbox off – a wild thought, I know – and then treat email like regular mail. How often do you get regular mail? Once a day, right? Well, that's the idea here. Once a day, open up your email and have at it. Then turn it off again.
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