Emails can become overwhelming. We try to do our work and this involves emails flying in. Email management is a challenge for many people at all levels in organisations. Managing emails means pro-actively managing them rather than reacting to them during the day. The problem is that emails can run your day.
So what can we do?
Here are some tips:
- Read emails at set time during the day. This may be first thing, lunchtime and then towards the end of the day. It depends on your role, but looking at emails in chunks can lead to focus rather than interruption.
- Turn email off when your doing project work. When you’re in meetings or on courses you hopefully turn your emails off, so why not during the day?
- Don’t always reply to immediately, the quicker you reply, the more they will expect a quick reply. Depends on clients and expectations, but maybe we can manage these expectations?
- Organise files and folders for your emails, so that your really important ones are in one folder.
- Communicate with those people who send you emails you really don’t need to see, politely ask to be taken off the dist list.
When emails become overwhelming what can we do?