Blogs

Reduce the holiday email overload to inbox zero

Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.

Will Rogers

Despite packing up your inbox properly before going on vacation did your colleagues still managed to fill it for you? Did you do nothing and just let the email mount up?

Holiday email overload

Here are our top five tips to reduce the email mountain to inbox zero very quickly.  They key is accepting that the more emails you send the more you receive.

1. Triage your emails into four categories:

• Important (eg from clients, about key projects)
• Nice to know about but nonessential
• Newsletters and circulars
• No relevance/use whatsoever

2. Identify the chains/threads/conversations relating to important. (In Outlook 2010 use View by Conversation.) Review them before responding to ensure what you are going say will really add value. If it will not then do not reply, simply file the emails away.
3. Locate all the newsletters and emails of no relevance and delete them.
4. Move to a folder all the remaining emails which you think might be useful and take five minutes each day for the rest of the week to review them. After five days delete what is left.
5. All too much? Declare email bankruptcy and wait for people to write again!

To maintain inbox zero, you now need to train your colleagues to change their email behaviour. More next month. Can’t wait, then contact us now to discuss how Mesmo Consultancy can help you.

Tags: Email Bankruptcy, Email behaviour, email overload, holday, inbox zero, Mesmo Consultancy, Outlook 2010

Comments are closed.