NFIB

Email Collection Can Become Enormous If You Aren't Taking Care of Business
03/ 28/ 2002


The ease of e-mail is great -- just get on-line, peck a note and send it away. But now that everyone is doing it, managing the ever-increasing stack of e-mails being sent your way can be an overwhelming task unless you get into a routine. Workshop contributor Bob Graham, an avid e-mail correspondent, shares his secrets.

A business associate recently told me she had dedicated a Friday to eliminating a stack of e-mails in her computer directory that had reached a total of 282. Once you get past about 50 unread messages -- or worse, messages you read once and didn't address in some way -- you have created for yourself one big chore.

One of the benefits of e-mail is also its curse. People can send you any thing at any time -- jokes, ideas, proposals, junk e-mails. One of the worst things that can happen is having someone proficient at forwarding e-mails sending you everything he or she gets.

The key to managing e-mail is to create a process for it. I dedicate the same time to it everyday. Just like paying the bills or making a trip to the post office to get the snail mail, I have made e-mail management a daily chore. I check my e-mail at least a dozen times a day, but during those times I only read what I want to or have to in order to conduct my business for the day. That's usually business stuff.

During my e-mail management time, which I have now expanded to include time for writing e-mails to non-essential business and social contacts, I quickly scan everything that has come in. Then I do the most important thing -- assess each e-mail's value. Based on that assessment, I do one of the following:

Print, then trash, critical items. Truly valuable e-mails can get lost or killed on computer so if they truly are something I need, I print them out. Then I kill them.

Move less critical items to one of several folders I created in my e-mail system. I have a freelance folder for everything I send or receive from a prospective client; a wife folder for messages to my wife; a teaching folder for things people send me who are in my journalism class; and a miscellaneous folder for everything else I'm afraid to delete right away. (Creating folders is easy, usually by going to the file menu and using Create Folder, followed by typing in the new folder's name.)

The last folder is the most important -- the trash folder. This is where I find I am putting increasing amounts of the things being sent to me by e-mail and almost all of the e-mails I send out, usually a day or two after sending them or once I know the recipients have received them. (Keep in mind you need to empty the trash folder at least once a day. I favor doing it at the end of the management session; that way I have a tally of the total I delete for the day.)

I play a game each day now to make this more fun. I try to exceed my daily total of incoming and outgoing e-mails with those going into the trash folder. If you can do that, you win.

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