Blogs

Overcome the Post Holiday Email Overload

How did your inbox cope with your absence? Unless you packed it up properly, it might be suffering with acute email overload. Take heart. The key is to prioritise your time and decide what is really worthy of your attention. Which emails must you answer? What is no longer an issue and therefore to reply is wasting both your time and the recipients. What really does not deserve your attention and can be deleted?

Here is a seven point fail-safe plan to help you cool it down and maybe even reach inbox zero.

1. Before you even open it, talk to your colleagues to find out what has been happening and what really needs your attention.
2. Open the box and sort and group by person/project. In Outlook use the ‘Show As Conversation’ view. See screen shoot below.
3. Pick off the emails which either must be answered or will earn you brownie points.
4. Pursue this path for an hour or two or at least until either you have identified all the critical emails or you have a meeting looming.
5. Flag all the high priority email (or move them to a folder). Deal with them as quickly as possible.
6. Move all the non-essential emails out of your inbox.
7. Make sure that by the end of the week you have dealt with all the important emails. If you have spare time you might want to peruse the non-essential ones. If not forget them and move on. They are past their sell by date.

If all else fails, delete the lot and declare ‘Email Bankruptcy’ safe in the knowledge that if anything was that important the sender will soon follow-up! When they do, bluff and say their email must have got lost.

Game, set and match. Holiday email backlog cleared. And for you ‘inbox zero’ and a clean inbox.

Need more help keeping on top of your email? Call us now and let us run a ‘Brilliant Email Management’ workshop for your and your colleagues.

Tags: Email Bankruptcy, email overload, holiday email overload

One response to “Overcome the Post Holiday Email Overload”

1. ★ Scott says:

   September 25, 2016 at 6:48 am

   Good tip I’ve got some other ones similar to this for email management.

   Use inbox rules
   Turn off email notifications

   plus a few others – mentioned them here: http://www.itrockstars.co.uk/reduce-emails-stay-focused-friday-show-episode-1/ what version of outlook were you using in this? Looks like 2007?