In this last segment, I want to address a technique that requires more planning and communication between you and your frequent email recipients.  It’s a little more effort to setup but worth it once the system is in place.

Keywords in the subject line are a great way to streamline your email management. This helps the receiver determine the urgency of your message. You (or they) can create rules that automatically route your email to different folders if you define a common set of keywords with your team for different topics or levels of urgency. (‘TODAY’, ‘THIS WEEK’, ‘PROJECT X’, ‘NOT-URGENT’,’APPROVAL’, etc.)

Ask our Service Desk (or your local geek) if you’d like assistance in setting these rules up. Once you have folders to sort your email into instead of one giant dumping box (IE: “InBox”), you’ll be able to digest those that matter most, first, and save the non-urgent stuff for a less critical time.

Email used to consume an average of two hours every day of my life. I hope for most of you it’s much less.  I finally decided this was far TOO MUCH time to be wasted! I knew there had to be a greater balance between the email Monster and face-to-face time, phone calls, or focused work time.

In addition to the tips above, I started having a trusted assistant help. She sorts and filters my email by urgency, even forwarding or replying to some. This has cut my time down to an average of an hour per day, and allows me to relax more during vacations or hectic trips, knowing that I can quickly address the more critical items and save the rest for later.

I hope these tips help you to save time handling emails. If we all work at reducing unnecessary messages, and “educating” others with these techniques, each of our personal Email Monsters will slowly shrink.

If you have other tips you’d like to share, please do.  This is an important issue and your feedback is always welcome. 

Your mailbox may never again become that cute, furry little puppy that it started out as, but at least you can trim it down from a T-Rex to a healthy (and helpful) Labrador.