Comments on: Help! I’m Buried By My Inbox

By: Sandra

Sandra — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 17:56:14 +0000

Great suggestions! And I can’t imagine life without all my folders. At least once a week I have to verbally follow up with a colleague about an email I sent a couple of days prior. He has so many emails that it takes too long to find it using the search function so he just asks me to send it again. No wonder he is always so stressed out.

I have benefited greatly from the “touch it once” principle. Obviously it is not practical for every email that comes through, but as soon as I read an email, I try to do what it requires and then file it in the appropriate folder. If I can’t deal with it then and there, it stays in my inbox, but it is rare for me to have more than 15 – 20 emails in my inbox. If I’m not organized, I’m too stressed to be productive.

By: Kath Robinson

Kath Robinson — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 14:15:07 +0000

If using MS Outlook, There are 2 tools I use daily…Categories and Clean Up. You can create as many categories as you want and color-code them. Every e-mail that comes in gets assigned to at least one category. Then I can look at them by subject…and if it’s in multiple categories, it is visible in each category, which for my multi-faceted workload is critical. Your e-mail count stays the same. If you do no other categories, at least do “Action Needed” and “Waiting for Response” categories. 99% of e-mails will fit into one of these categories and it’s a very simple way to check your “to do” list and see who has taken too long to respond and needs a reminder.

The other tool is “Clean Up”. This puts any e-mail redundancies into your Deleted folder (where it is retrievable). If an e-mail has an added/deleted participant, attachment on/off, etc. it is saved…this just removes clean old back-and-forth conversations so that it just has the latest one. I do this multiple times a day, to great benefit.

Thank you for all the wisdom from Crucial Skills!
Kath

By: Steve Willis

Steve Willis — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 16:32:04 +0000

In reply to Ammon. As in, anybody on the team can answer, or delete any email?

By: Ammon

Ammon — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:41:32 +0000

So I work on a team that shares an inbox. How do you clarify as a group?

By: Steve Willis

Steve Willis — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:25:37 +0000

In reply to Ralph. That's been my experience also. When I stopped using my inbox as a storage folder, it changed my life.

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 12:55:01 +0000

Establishing rules for the inbox relating to people, activities, clients, events are easy to do and make the inbox an “at a glance” activity instead of a search, read, decide scenario – saves tremendous amounts of time.

By: Ralph

Ralph — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 19:01:04 +0000

Folders are so useful for this type of thing. I have a read later folder (not urgent but interesting) Follow-up (I periodically check this and follow-up) and several categories with different levels of priority (kind of Franklin Planner style). I have never understood how anyone could function keeping everything in their in-box without using folders.