06/ 09/ 2005
by Judy Artunian
Do you check your e-mail every 20 minutes? Do you read and reply to nearly every message as soon as it arrives? When you have a question for an employee, do you automatically e-mail him rather than pick up the phone?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, your e-mail practices might be cutting into your productivity. Hard to believe that e-mail, the wonder of electronic communication that has streamlined so many business transactions, can also be a major distraction at work? It doesn't seem so farfetched when you consider the volume of e-mail that lands in our inboxes daily. According to The Radicati Group, a market research firm, the average corporate e-mail user receives 99 e-mails per day.
Here are some tips for taming e-mail overload.
Wean Yourself from Constant E-mail Monitoring
- Turn off the e-mail alerts that let you know when a new message has arrived.
- To ensure that you don't miss urgent messages from employees or customers, set your e-mail program to notify you when messages from certain e-mail addresses come through.
- Limit yourself to checking e-mail no more than three times a day.
- Unless a message truly warrants an immediate response, wait until the end of the day to respond. Business etiquette and productivity experts say that a 24-hour turnaround is acceptable.
Organize Your E-mail
- To make it easier to find stored messages, keep them in folders that relate to projects you work on or people you interact with. Many e-mail programs can be set up to automatically sort messages into the appropriate folders. When a new message arrives, the folder will be automatically highlighted.
- Another way to organize messages is with a feature like Microsoft Outlook's Search Folder capability. It lets you view your inbox according to criteria you set up. For example, you can ask the program to create a Search Folder when messages from a particular client or department arrive in your inbox. When you click on the Search Folder, you can see the messages in your inbox from those individuals.
- Clean out your inbox about twice a month. Delete messages you no longer need, and transfer others into folders if your program doesn't do that for you.
- Avoid copying 15 people on an e-mail that only five people really need to read. This will help your colleagues avoid e-mail overload while helping reduce the number of potential e-mail responses that come back to you.
Consider the Instant Message Option
- When you need quick information from a colleague, consider using IM instead of e-mail. You may be able to get the answers you need without crowding your inbox with several messages back and forth.
- You don't need expensive IM programs to communicate with those outside your company. Many companies have connections to external IM "clients" like MSN, AOL and Yahoo.
- Options for keeping spam out of your inbox include using server-based filters such as Spam Arrest.They send a message back to senders who aren't in your contact list, asking them to confirm that they are a live person and not a spammer. The downside of such programs is that when legitimate senders don't respond to the program's query, you may miss important messages.
- Many Internet service providers offer a client-based filter at no extra charge. One version of such filters attempts to identify spam by looking for patterns and sending suspicious messages to a special folder. You can check the folder later to make sure that legitimate messages weren't flagged as spam. Another version allows you to train the software to look for e-mails with certain words or phrases that you want relegated to the spam folder.
- Don't reveal any of your company's e-mail addresses on public Web sites such as discussion boards and chat rooms. Spammers use a tool that searches Web sites for the "@" symbol. When the tool finds that symbol, it knows that it has found an e-mail address and adds the address to the spam list. If you want to use public Web sites, sign up for an alternate e-mail account with Hotmail or Yahoo.
