Chicken Soup For The Email-Challenged Soul
Take a deep breath. Everything is going to be all right. I know you just got back from vacation and you’re staring at an inbox filled with 2,000 unread messages. It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Monday and you’ve only gotten through three email replies so far and you’re pretty sure you’ll never get through the rest.
Or maybe you feel so guilty that you couldn’t bear to tear yourself away from your email during your week out of the office. So while the kids were screaming with joy on an inner tube being dragged behind a speed boat, you were sitting starboard surreptitiously perusing your email.
Well, it’s time for an intervention folks. I’m here to tell you that you are addicted to your email and you need to stop. Put the iPhone down and back away slowly. Close Outlook and for God’s sake, please turn off those pop-up alerts that tell you every time a new, useless missive lands in your email box.
Be The Boss
The key to maintaining a healthy relationship with your email, it seems to me, is taking back control. And that means bringing some order to the chaos by filtering your messages.
Karl Hakkarainen, owner of the IT firm Queen Lake Consulting in Holden, responded to my request for email triage advice on the Worcester Business Journal LinkedIn Discussion Group. He said his personal strategy for managing the email that streams into his Gmail account is to set up automatic tags that help him prioritize.
“Once tagged, those messages are placed in a special queue and brought to the top of your inbox,” he writes. “Mail from my wife, for example, is in this queue.”
Hakkarainen goes on to write that he uses Gmail’s filtering system to separate out messages that are sent directly to him from messages that are mass distributed, like email newsletters.
“With good filters, my inbox is reserved for things that require immediate review,” he writes.
So, in short, if you don’t have filters set up on your email account, get them going today. Seriously. Stop what you’re doing (yes, I’m suggesting you rip your eyes away from my gorgeous prose), open up your email and set up some filters. It will improve your quality of life. I promise.
Get Some Perspective
Speaking of improving your quality of life, Rebecca Osborne, a Clinton resident who owns her own personal organizing business, A Spacious Place, recommends that her clients take time out to reflect on priorities.
“I think people have bought into a false way of thinking that the more you have, the happier you are. But the opposite is usually the case,” she said. “Email does the same thing. It’s just another form of clutter.”
Osborne takes her clients through a variety of steps to help them get their inboxes in order. One important recommendation is to get off as many email newsletter lists as possible. It’s not difficult to do. Most mass emails include an obvious unsubscribe link, usually at the bottom of the message. With one or two clicks you can reduce your email clutter.
Osborne also suggests that people think about their email the same way they think about paper messages.
“I find that people treat email very differently from filing paperwork, but they’re the same thing,” she said. So rather than letting a bunch of unread messages keep your stomach in knots, simply move messages that you want to follow-up on into a special folder. If you’re a real email hoarder, Osborne says you should give yourself a limit of messages that you can have in that folder at any given time. Once you hit the limit, you have to remove one message before you add a new one.
Tweet Withdrawal
Erin Howard, owner of Streamline Marketing of Shrewsbury, told me that she’s a recovered email addict who is now able to take a much more laissez-faire attitude toward her inbox.
“I used to spend a lot of time keeping my unread messages down and making sure that I filed or flagged everything right away,” she said. But now that she owns her own business (she used to work in big corporate environments at Staples and EMC) she’s found that being glued to her inbox is simply not worth her time.
“How I manage it is by basically not managing,” she joked.
In all seriousness, Howard has applied some intelligence to her efforts. Client emails, of course, always get top priority. She’s also limited the alerts she receives from social networks, opting instead to check sites like Facebook for what’s new, rather than being constantly bombarded by email comments.
And she doesn’t obsess over cleaning out her inbox.
One personal pet peeve that I’ll note: Don’t let unread messages clog up your email. I’ve seen many a manager with thousands of unread messages sitting in their inboxes. All that does is destroy your self image. If you haven’t read a week-old email, chances are you are never going to. To borrow a phrase from our LinkedIn contributor Karl Hakkarainen, it’s okay to “declare email bankruptcy” and delete all old, unread messages. No one will judge you. I swear.
Got news for our Digital Diva column?
E-mail Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
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