Managing the Email Blizzard

Tips on Managing the Email Blizzard

Email is both a blessing and a curse. It is a wonderful blessing in that we can now communicate fast economically and immediately. If you get 20-30 emails a day you probably consider it a blessing. However if you get several hundred emails a day it can become a curse and maybe you’re wishing you’d never got an email address. So what does a person do when the email blizzard gets unmanageable?

RADICAL ACTIONS

You may not be so desperate as to need these radical approaches but if you are about to collapse and run off into the woods driven insane by the email blizzard consider these:

1. Start fresh. Sometimes when I have more than 500 emails in my in box I celebrate a “year of Jubilee” and wipe out all the email debt in one swoop. I simply start fresh by dragging all of them to a folder marked “refrigerator” or something like that. I sometimes fish through these leftovers in the refrigerator to find important people to answer (like my wife or boss) but mostly I just forget them. If they don’t write again they are lost forever. I often do this at the end of summer when I live email-free and face several thousand emails. It is drastic but effective.

2. Quit email altogether. If you are important enough and “high enough on the ladder” consider leaving email altogether. Do you think the President of the USA answers email? Publish only your administrative assistant’s email address and change your routing on your own email address so that it all goes to your assistant. Let them respond or forward email to the proper person. If it is something YOU need to see they can forward it to you—but do not answer it directly, instead reply back to the assistant who can answer the person like this: I have consulted Dr. [insert big boss’s name] and he wanted me to respond to you with his answer: (include answer). Of course if you do this you will have to have a trusted administrative assistant (THIS is the growth position of the future—secretaries are no longer needed—people smart enough to answer emails are what we need in the future). If you do this you might want a “private line” email address for your family and President of your institution can use.

3. Let it lie. It seems irresponsible and it is radical surgery but you could simply drag all your in-basket to a folder and start fresh without telling anyone. The people expecting a reply usually write again anyway with the email delivery uncertainty. Just wipe them out as if your computer server got fried (more of a wonderful daydream now than a nightmare!)

These above are radical solutions to the problem but here are some more reasonable ways to manage email.

INCOMING EMAIL

Use your filters with a vengeance. Learning how to use your email filters will save you hours of time over the next year. Learn now.

§ Auto-delete many with filter: It only takes a few seconds to delete a message while costing a full minute to make a filter to automatically delete similar messages forever. However the full minute is worth the long term investment. Face it, if you’ve already decided not to buy Viagra online why not simply delete every message automatically with the word Viagra or “free iPod”—or at least divert the message into an folder titled “SPAM?.” If your spam program cleans out most of these fine—only 25% of the emails coming to Indiana Wesleyan get through, the rest are trashed by the institutional spam filters. I have to trash the rest. If your email address is posted ANYwhere on the web you’re going to get spam. I treat spam that makes it through like a crossword puzzle—as a challenge to make another filter that will automatically delete or move any similar message.

§ Set priorities by filtering. All of us have people we consider important—from a boss or ready-to-deliver pregnant daughter. The president of my University, the Provost, my division chair and my family are important people in my in-box. Use your filters to change the color of the message, priority level, or to play a sound whenever one of these messages come so they don’t get buried. (Occasionally someone is in my office when my computer gives a quiet smooching sound—I smile and simply say, “My wife just emailed me” I know when they leave to check for Sharon’s message (and they sometimes realize they ought to leave sooner). Also my students are my priority so they all know a key word they can put in a subject line that will pop their email to the top of my priority pile. I’ve set my filters to recognize that key word so they automatically get my attention ahead of others.

§ Eliminate email from some domains altogether. Sometimes you have no care whatsoever for mail from some domains—just filter them out completely, or at least set the filters to go automatically into a file to look at later. Sure, if you make lots of filters you’ll eventually lose some incoming mail you’d rather have read (your brother kidding you about turning 40 and saying the word “Viagra” in his email) but it is better to lose a few emails than to get buried in a thousand.

Make lots of files. Increasingly email is becoming the primary filing system for workers, especially information workers. If you use filters you’ll probably make lots of files in which to organize things. Make a file to stick notes you really can’t toss, label it “keep this.” If you get stuff you shouldn’t delete but don’t know what to do with, stick it in a file called “hold.” Most administrators have a file called, “Policy.” I use date files like “Sort at Christmas” or “read this summer.” I set a goal to clean up my inbox before eating supper each day (and I often fail). An inbox longer than one screen makes you feel constantly behind in your work—that feeling will seep into everything else you do.

Consider a secret Gmail account. If you use Outlook consider also opening a Gmail account and set your filters so they automatically send a copy to your Gmail account of every email you send (or even every email from certain domains). Then you can trash all outgoing mail and go to Gmail to find that email you’re looking for—their search engine is so good you can find anything there and Gmail allows such huge space you never have to delete there.

Get off your friend’s cute-things mailing list. Some people have too much time on their hands. If they forward cute things to you simply send a courteous note asking to be removed from their list. (This is a great time to use an auto-reply message—see below.) If all they ever send is forwarded junk mail simply label their name as junk mail sender and poof—they disappear forever.

Answer email immediately when you read it. Most of us hate to do this. We like to read it, nod, then think about it a while or “let it marinate.” It does not marinate—it only hangs around as rots. Answer it at once. Even if you say less than you want to—that’s probably better anyway.

Refer email immediately if someone else can answer it. Just click reply and tell them who they should have written to—and it gets you out of the loop.

Use redirect to redirect some mail. Redirect is a plug in program which enables you to simply route the incoming email to another person and it appears to them that it came from the original person and was not forwarded by you (lots of opportunity for tricks here—avoid those naughty thoughts now!). For instance if someone writes to me asking about the worship major (which I used to lead but is now led by Constance Cherry I can redirect it to Constance so when she clicks reply her answer goes directly to the person writing—I am out of the loop. This is the equivalent of the way we use to treat printed letters—sending on to others to answer. I prefer giving the email address to the original sender but this is an alternative way to do the same thing.

Answer with a quick question. If someone has written you an extended email of 20 paragraphs let it sit awhile then click reply and ask a question for clarification. That puts the ball back on their court and opens up a “conversation”(see below).

Don’t do other people’s work for them. With more than a thousand articles published on the web I get an email almost every day from students in other colleges asking me questions “for a paper I’m writing.” Basically they want me to do their research for them. I have a clever “Sorry-I don’t do library research for students” auto-reply for such students. Also, some lower level personnel will use email to get the bosses to work for them. Just don’t do it. Secretaries are infamous for attaching cute files which you are supposed to print out and return by interoffice mail—saving time for the lower paid employees and transferring that effort to higher paid employees. Don’t do their work for them—paste your answer into an email and make THEM print it out. If you have power in your organization make people stop this wasteful practice.

Don’t answer broadcast emails. It is bad enough for one person to ask another to do their research for them. Its worse when they send a broadcast email to a dozen professors with their list of questions. Email is personal communication not a chat room—it is poor manners and shows a lack of respect for the recipient’s time and an inflated opinion of their own importance. All of us need to band together and discipline such time robbers—an auto-reply correction is the best way to do this.

Remove your name from low priority lists. Perhaps you think you are saving time by simply deleting the messages every time they come rather than unsubscribing. You won’t—eventually it will catch up to you. Remember, you can always subscribe again. At least filter-route them to a file like “read next month.” (I’ve found “next” month never comes—it is a handy device!)

Watch personal & family messages. Your daughter might email you a picture of your grandson; your friend from high school may write telling you what happened at the reunion; your sister could write a long letter telling you about her latest marriage crisis asking advice. These and other personal emails now take up 10% of a worker’s day (and 10% of their salary time). Some companies consider it stealing to use your “company time” for personal emails just as much as it would be to talk a half hour to your sister on the phone, or leave work for an hour each day to do personal errands. This is why some companies restrict personal and family messages and insist that all messages be company related. But most companies live with personal use of their email systems since they expect people to work extra or otherwise compensate their personal use of the company email system by answering company emails at home. Other companies (more than you’d think) run all email messages through a server loop and someone in power spot reads them periodically to monitor the level and kind of personal correspondence. (If this surprises you, remember email is owned by the company and the first rule of email is “Write nothing you’d be uncomfortable at seeing in tomorrow’s paper.”) So, if you get lots of family and personal correspondence, consider scheduling a time to do it once a day—lake maybe ten minutes before (after?) the office closes—then if you want to stay an extra hour to give advice to your sister, you’ll be “on your own time.” But, of course, if you are salaried you probably already work 50-60 hours a week, and if you are a minister maybe more, so you might consider it fair to answer personal mail during the day. Just the same, scheduling a time to do personal email is a good idea.

Budget time for second-tier priority email. Most of us get more mail than we can answer. If answering my email were my full time job I could carefully read and answer each. I’d love that—after all, I like to write. But that’s not my “day job.” I teach college students. So, when I answer many emails from people who are not my students I rob my students of what they (their parents) pay for. So I can never get to all my email. But I can set a weekly time to “catch up” on email that is not directly related to my work. At one point that time was Sunday afternoon from 1PM to 5 pm. During those four hours I could crank through the week’s unread messages pretty fast. What I didn’t get done by 4 pm I simply deleted or dragged to the refrigerator. I just can’t give more than four hours a week to answering email outside my primary calling and job. (If you are reading this on the web the chances are some of your emails got routed to this electronic purgatory—sorry, be patient you might get a delayed answer sometime next summer when I occasionally fish through old email like this.

Develop auto-reply messages. Chances are you have some messages you need to send more than once. Messages like “Please take me off your mailing list” or “Sorry but I am buried in email I can’t get to your message for a while.” Some of these can actually be turned into auto replies that are triggered by your filters—though be careful of that practice if you don’t really understand filters and after all, you don’t want to add to the email blizzard of others. However, if you answer lots of email ask yourself when replying to an email, “Can I use this response again?” As a professor I get lots of student questions that are similar. They ask, “How can I know God’s will for sure?” or “How far can I go with my girlfriend before it is sin?” or “my parents told me they’re splitting—how can God let this happen?” or “I’m losing my faith I think.” All these are questions I’ll be asked again. So when answering them send myself a copy you can later use again. For me some have become Tuesday Columns and articles later on. Others I store in a “common replies” folder to cut and paste with. I’m not like James Dobson who has roomfuls of people who answer email for him—I have to do this myself, so I’ve got to do what Dobson does: write stock answers to repetitive questions. (In fact this column on email started with a reply to an email on overcoming the email blizzard).

Well, I need to go answer some of my email so I’ll close now… these are a few email tips for starters. They are not complete but they are a start to managing the email blizzard. If you have others send them my way in an email ;-)

By Keith Drury 11/1/2005