Workplace
(I tried to write that without it sounding like a "Carry on Film"...google it if you are too young to remember...)
Research by the Universities of Glasgow and Paisley showed that one third of email users feel stressed by the heavy volume of email.
I reckon it is higher than that...
It is a pet hate of mine. My overactive creative brain sometimes struggles to see the wood for the trees if I have too many emails kicking about so I work EXTREMELY hard at managing this. I am not a natural organiser, so it takes effort for me daily. But I work on this. Every single day....
Not wanting to sound smug...at time of writing I have six emails in my inbox, and I always try ensuring I can see my whole inbox on a single screen otherwise it starts to stress me out.
I spoke with someone recently who had over 10,000 emails in their inbox. 😧 I couldn't cope with that. I know it wastes so much time trying to find emails / re-reading them etc.
Recognising that managing email is important to help to reduce our stress levels, and it helps manage our attention better so we can work more productively. And if you have the sort of attention span that I have, you need all the help you can get.
Anyway, here are a few quick tips I hope might help anyone with a bunged-up inbox. ("Ooooh Matron!")
If the aim is to reduce the number of emails in our inbox....as a target, could you get the number of emails in your inbox to zero?
Consider your inbox as the place where emails land, not as a to do list.
Create folders e.g. @action, @read, @waiting to file emails pending further action.
Turn off every sound and graphic and visit your inbox when you are ready; not when it nags you.
Do not “check” your email; “process” your email and try not to read emails more than once unless necessary.
Review and clean up email regularly - set-up, delete, process one by one.
Create fewer, bigger folders for ease of filing management.
And perhaps the best tip I can offer - turn off email completely if you are working on something important that needs your full attention.
With every email that arrives there are only seven things you can do:
Delete or file
Do it now (if less than a 2-minute action, do it at once)
Do it later - schedule time in the diary to do it (Did you know you can drag an email across to your diary in outlook to create an appointment with yourself or over to your task list.)
Decide it does not need an action, but file it for reference or future use
Delegate it to someone else to deal with
Defer the decision about whether to act
Decide whether there is no action required from you but whether you wish to track whether someone else follows through
For more great email / time management tips, I can recommend reading “How to be a Productivity Ninja” by Graham Alcott.
Welcome any feedback or comments, preferably not by email... 😉
But if you must…hello@whitecubeconsulting.com