Email overload: tame that inbox... and let Outlook do most of the slog
(My, what a tabloidy-sounding title.
(Firstly, the Outlook-centricness of this post is sadly unavoidable. That's just what they have at my workplace. For Thunderbird and Gmail, where we talk about coloured 'follow up' flags, feel free to substitute tags.)
James Cridland has collated some useful tips from BBCers on how to deal with email. Worth a read if you're in any busy organisation and get flooded by work (and not-so-work) emails.
Follow-ups since James posted:
JF (person who originally asked for tips):
Thanks very much to all of you. Really helpful thoughts - for what it's worth, my top tips are below. I'd like to collate all these into some tips to share with colleagues - James, hopefully I can use your blog entry as a starting point for this. It will be interesting to see what else you get.
But first, how many people would love to be able to search your mail archive as easily as Gmail, or the internet more generally? It's amazing what I can find in my personal Gmail archive from six or seven years ago at a touch of a button. And it would save SO MUCH TIME at work, as well - say, looking for people who seemed good but weren't available last time I wanted to arrange an interview on a certain topic. Of course the Outlook search takes so long to find something, that I find I rarely bother, and never try using a second keyword when you don't find the item you were seeking first time around.
I've been lobbying various people for a Google Desktop, or Xobni (inbox search software) implementation for ages, but it all falls on deaf ears. Too expensive, too uncollegiate, and so on. But imagine what a treasure trove of useful ideas and information our inbox archives are! I know some people are allowed Google Desktop, restricted not to share outside the BBC, but someone, presumably at [the BBC's contract IT provider], has kiboshed any future users of this. Any ideas? I've even considered a petition...
Anyway, ever since realising a few months ago that I was spending half my life scrolling through my inbox trying to figure out what to do next, and constantly updating several handwritten to-do lists, I've developed a system that seems to work as a dynamic, constantly updated to-do list.
I use the principle of Delete it, Deal with it, or Delegate it. Sadly I don't really have anyone to delegate to, so I have to delete or deal with things. This is really nerdy I know, but every message on its way in that can't be knocked no the head immediately gets a coloured flag:
Red: urgent to do
Blue: less urgent to do
Yellow: something to hold until the issue is dealt with
Green: Generic stuff it's handy to be able to access in a second
Orange: ideas to present at meetings or to others
Purple: ideas to pursue if I ever get any time
The best thing about this is that you can sort by coloured flag, so you can see what needs doing in a second. You can email yourself, instead of keeping to-do lists, and if something becomes urgent, change the colour from blue to red.
You can also, on the flag button when an email is open, tell Outlook to give you a reminder at a certain date and time, so it handles deadlines nicely as well. Given all that, I still never seem to get below 200 items in the inbox, and that's not including all those yellow-flagged items which get stuck in a pending folder to go through whenever I get time.
I know it sounds complicated, but I reckon I manage to get a lot, lot more done that I used to. I don't seem to send many more emails (still around 1500 a month, unbelievably, or one every six minutes...), but this has helped focus my time immensely.
JF in reply to HB:
Sorry, one more thing - does anyone have any tips for part time people dealing with email? A lot of my colleagues are only in the office two or three days a week, so find an absolute barrage of material when they arrive back from a few days away - more than can realistically be dealt with, especially as they may have to be on air or producing a programme within half an hour.
HB in reply to JF:
Part-timers? First off, they should ask to be removed from all the distribution lists they can.
Some intelligent filters can help - for example, delete anything with *junk* or JUNK: in the title and anything marked as Low importance (look for "marked as importance" in Outlook's rule building wizard). Use colour rules too, to colour red anything with High importance or a deadline attached. (As a company we should encourage good email practice on the part of the sender, which would help with the previous two points.)
They should compose an intelligent Out of Office saying "I'm part time. Please re-address anything important to..." My Out of Office gives two different addresses: one in the internal address book for internal people and an external-facing address for others.
AW in reply to HB:
Personally, I want to be on MORE distribution lists. Quite useful sources of information most of the time!
HB in reply to AW:
Agreed - but I work here five days a week (and enjoy the general hum and occasional great idea from [our high-traffic internal mailing list] rather than find it annoying). If I only worked two or three days, I'd be drowning.
JF in reply to HB:
Really useful tips there H. Email etiquette is so important though - it's almost a separate topic. How many times have you sent an email to someone that was then forwarded to a group of 20, which would have been drafted more thoughtfully or slightly differently if the wider audience was the original intention? There's no malice intended I think, it's just one of those habits people have.
DH in reply to JF:
I don't know. Two of the things that make e-mail so powerful are the ease with which you can forward e-mails and the fact that it is so simple to send to multiple people. I can see that etiquette around forwarding needs to cover confidentiality, and possible offence, but if you start making rules about things not being drafted well, in a format that is mostly about speed and convenience, I think you're getting into baby and bathwater scenarios.
Finally, Jason in a comment to James's post adds: "Best tip I've heard is to set a rule to delete anything you're only CCed on. If it's important, then they should have sent it directly to you."
Use that last one if it works for you. Myself, I'm not CCed on things all that often, and when I am it tends to be things that are relevant to me (such as people discussing things they're going to ask me to fix when they decide on them).
View the original post at HellHound.net