Taming the email dragon. Simple Solutions for Busy Managers. Sharon Leighton Consultancy.

Taming the Email Dragon

Top tips to manage your email

February 2011

In this issue

E - Erase & Eliminate

M - Mailboxes & Mobile email

A - Attachments & Archive

I - Inbox

S - Search & Sort

Greetings!

Disorganised

Do you come back from a holiday to a huge email backlog yet still haven't cleared it?

Do you periodically clear out your in-box and get to zero unread emails, but within a week are back to 250+ emails?

Do you obsessively file away many of your emails, spending hours each week keeping it organised?

Taming the Dragon

Living in Wales, the land of dragons and castles, my email account seems like a threatening dragon.

In theory, a wonderful thing but in reality, it burns!

I know all those top tips to manage my email but periodically it all goes wrong. It only takes one trip to fill up that empty in-box. If I'm travelling a lot, it can easily get out of hand!

Today I have about 1000 emails, 250 unread, and over 50 mailboxes.

Does this sound familiar?

Face the facts of life: we are destined to always drown in email. You cannot control who emails you or the volume you'll get so you have to learn to live with email overload.

So here are 11 tips to help you feel more comfortable with this email dragon and to avoid it taking over your life. Just remember the acronym:

E M A I L S

Sharon

E is for Erasing them and also Eliminating them at source

ERASE. It's obvious but have you found the most efficient way to erase them? If you have more than 50 emails, the quickest way is to sort them by sender or subject line and delete them in blocks. Develop the habit of dealing with todays email at the end of the day: remember FAB - File, Action or Bin.

ELIMINATE. So many organisations collect your email address, that you probably end up getting unwanted newsletters, updates or alerts. Hotel special offers, loyalty card points, special offers on Amazon, etc. If they don't help you in your life, unsubscribe (or at least use the Rules function to put them in a Junk mailbox). Spam is illegal in many countries so if you no longer want updates, the sender has to stop sending up emails. Still getting unwanted emails? In some email programmes you can edit the junk email folder options to recognise certain senders or word phrases.

M is for Mailboxes and also for Mobile email

MAILBOXES. Are you making best use of mailboxes? Probably a lot of emails can be read then deleted. But what if you want to keep important project emails or that nice email complimenting your team? Sensible mailbox names make a big difference. They should mirror the naming system you use for file directories, like people's names or project titles so it's easy for you to find them again. Using mailboxes makes it easier to Archive them, but that's another letter - A for Archive!

MOBILE. Many people now have smartphones like Blackberries, iPhones or Android phones to read emails. Are you making best use of your phone? If you read and delete email on your phone, does it automatically delete it from your mail server or do you have to delete it twice? Do you read it then decide you'll deal with it later when you use your laptop/desktop machine? Your time is expensive!

A is for Attachments and also for Archive or Action

ATTACHMENTS. There are often two or three ways you can save attachments, depending on what email package you are using. I can drag and drop files when using the email on my Mac. Do you have a similar shortcut? It's quicker than right-clicking and deciding which directory to add it to.

ARCHIVE OR ACTION. Every email should involve an action: do something, file it or bin it. You may need to store emails for some time, like project or personnel information. If you don't save them as files, then ARCHIVE them. Archiving emails is often very easy so they are removed from your mailbox but they are still accessible for that one occasion in a year that you need to retrieve it! Check out your email help to learn how to do. And test retrieving it!

Did you know that your IT department automatically archives every email? You'd be surprised what pops up in litigation cases. Someone I know had his email warning of off-label promotion quoted on the front page of the New York Times, including his name. Imagine.... or better to not imagine.

I is for Inbox

INBOX. Not every email has stay in your inbox for you to decide on action. You can set up rules to automatically file/delete/autoforward to someone else (e.g. your administrator). You can change the colour, flag it or play sounds. It's an easy way to file efficiently, as long as you periodically check your new mailboxes. If you find you don't bother - do you need to receive the email? Check out E- Eliminate!

L is for Links and also for Learn to live with it!

LINKS. Some emails include useful links. You could always save the link in your bookmarks in your web browser but have you tried a social bookmarking service like Delicious or StumbleUpon? You can access your bookmarks from any computer, home or at work. They can be shared: to find great weblinks related to Medical Information, check my Delicious account out. Use your own or suggested tags to search for specific links e.g. EFPIA etc.

LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT! Does it really matter if you have lots of emails? In the world of information overload we have to learn to ignore the deluge. If it really worries you, you can always set up an email box for each year or month and just archive the previous year/month. Storage is very cheap. How often do you really need to access old emails? Combine this tactic with the next tip - Search!

S is for Search and also for Sort

SEARCH

If you find you waste hours filing emails into multiple mailboxes, ask yourself why you are doing it? Someone told me she spent 3 hours a week filing away her emails on a Friday afternoon. My first thought was why (and my second was get a life!). If you find your anal retentive tendencies taking over: STOP! The search function was made for you! My mail programme uses relevancy to display the results. It helps me file away relevant project related emails (for archive purposes).

SORT You can sort emails using any of the information fields you have on your default view (which you can customize). It can be a quick way to find out which emails have the biggest attachments, if your mailbox is too large and needs pruning.

So now you have 11 top tips for managing your email.

So hopefully like Donkey in the movie Shrek, you've tamed your dragon and turned a fearful, fire-breathing dragon into a purring pussycat!

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