Don’t declare email bankruptcy

Posted on December 14th, 2007

Do you get a lot of email, and have a difficult time keeping up with all of it?

Do you sort your email into folders based on the person that sent it? (I see this often at work)
Or worse, do you keep all your email in your Inbox?

If so, read on to learn some tips on how to better organize your email and ride on top of the wave, rather than sinking under the ever-increasing current of today’s information age.

Here’s a sample scenario. Say you have a bunch of emails with the same subject line (a thread). Lets say there are 50 emails on this same topic, involving 5 different people.

Sort by Sender

Here’s what would happen if you sort them by Sender:

The first problem is that you have to decide who is more important to you. Maybe it’s your boss, manager, or, if you are a manager yourself, your lead developer or engineer.

So you read their email first.

You can skim through their email messages, and maybe read 3 of their 10 emails in that particular thread, just to get an idea about what’s going on. Then maybe you feel safe enough to mark the rest of their email in that thread as ‘read’.

At this point, you are missing this information:

• knowledge of which folder to look in next
• knowledge of whether or not the issue is resolved

And you have these statistics:
Total emails read: 3
Total emails processed: 10
Total emails left with an unread status: 40

See how we are getting buried already? We’ve only managed to process 20% of the emails. And we’re short on some critical information. We don’t know where to go from here, so we will likely end up leaving behind those 40 unread messages in “the pile”.

Also, what if your least favorite person in the thread posted a perfect solution? You will likely never see it. ( maybe you are happy, just to spite them, LOL )

Sort By Project or Topic

So, lets use the same scenario — 50 emails, but this time we have a rule or filter that puts all of these related email into a single folder. With this strategy, it is irrelevant how many senders there are, because they are all here, in one place.

You might start with the first message in the thread, and you can skip through them, reading maybe every 10th email, and have a basic idea of what’s going on. Let’s assume you stopped reading with the most recent email in the thread.

At this point you have:

• knowledge of who is currently taking responsibility for the issue
• knowledge of whether or not the issue is resolved
• time — because you didn’t need to hunt through folders to follow a thread
• safety knowing that you can mark the entire thread as ‘read’, because you can see the big picture

Total emails read: 5
Total emails processed: 50
Total emails left with an unread status: 0

Conclusion

You might be saying now: “well, I don’t get that many emails on one subject.”

That may be true, but over the course of time, the same affect is happening on a smaller scale, even if there are only 5 emails. Because even one email per day that goes unread, starts to cause a pile-up.

You might also be saying “How do you expect me to sort my email by subject? Half of the people that write to me don’t even enter a subject line, let alone use a descriptive one!”

This can be a challenge. One way to avoid this problem is to ask people to provide a meaningful subject. Ask them to use a convention like “[projectName] This is my subject”, and tell them you will do the same, and that you want both of you to be organized. If you are having trouble with email at work, talk to your management about it, or if you are management, put a policy in place.

If you are a manager or key player in your company, you can tell your subordinates that you will not read their email if it doesn’t have one of a series of “[project]” tags in the subject.

Another similar avenue is to ask your IT department to create a series of mailing distribution lists for each project. That makes it easy to sort your mail into your project folders because the sender will now be the name of the distribution list.

I hope this article was of some use. Please feel free to leave a comment or criticism.

Tags: anxiety, e-mail, email, management, organization, overload, overwhelmed, self improvement, self-help, software
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