It's not just the spam that's troublesome, however. It's also dealing with "real" e-mails from people who are trying to reach me. What's the best way to organize those messages? Should I create a folder for every single e-mail that I want to save?
This post is a followup to my New Year's Resolution post in which I decided to take monthly baby steps towards professional and personal improvement in 2008. My baby steps were inspired by this post at Work-It Mom.
At the end of this post I'll let you know how I did with January's goal, in the meantime I'm going to let you in on February's goal: to handle my e-mail more effectively.
What is the best way to handle the onslaught of e-mail, which can be overwhelming?
I decided to gather some resources about managing e-mail, and here's what I found:- 10 Tips for Managing Email Effectively at DailyBlogTips. For me, the top tip here is # 3, Process e-mails in batches.
- 6 Ways to Manage Over 100 Emails in 1 Day at Winning the Web. A couple of these strategies aren't really feasible for me - I dislike auto-responders and I'm not in a position to hire someone to handle my e-mail. The top tip here for me is to filter e-mails by level of importance.
- 5 Rules to Avoiding Email Overload at Slacker Manager. Wow, this blogger must be looking over my shoulder. My top tip from this batch is: Don't Use E-mail to procrastinate.
- How many emails are in your inbox right now? at OnlineBusinessManager.com. Okay, this one is a direct challenge for me. The blogger states that if there are more than 50 e-mails in your inbox, there are too many. I'm sitting here with, ummm, let's just say that it's over 50 e-mails in my inbox.
- Using Multiple Emails at Let's Talk Organizing. Are people with more than one e-mail account more organized? I currently have six e-mail addresses.This post deals with organizing your multiple e-mails.
I currently have a policy to try to respond to every "real" e-mail within 24 hours, which I think I'll keep. However, I have gotten a bad habit of using e-mail to procrastinate. There's really no need to check my e-mail more than twice a day. In addition, I need to learn to handle e-mails right away by either answering, filing, or deleting them. I may never get down to just 50 e-mails in my inbox, but I should be able to keep the inboxes from building up any more.
So that's it, that's my e-mail goal for February.
How did I do with January's goal, which was to stop pressing sleep-doze on my alarm clock?
At first, I did really well with this goal because I know that I would have to come back here and blog about it. As the month wore on, I found that there were a few days that I was so tired that I hit sleep-doze despite the goal.
Overall, I'd say that I significantly reduced the number of times that I feel back to sleep. The handful of days that I did hit sleep-doze, I discovered that it was because I was really exhausted. I think that I'll always struggle with this on certain days, but at least now it's not automatic.
What about you? Are you still on track with your New Year's resolutions? What about your e-mail, do you struggle to manage it? Why not share?
Leave a comment and let us know.
» What are Your Goals for February? from ProductivityGoal
January's over! How fast time flies. And while the calendar page for February's still fresh, why not list down your February goals?What? You're asking me? Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get myself a new scanner for my paperless of... [Read More]
Tracked on: February 4, 2008 3:23 PM | Permalink to Trackback