If you are like most successful professionals, your technology works hard for you.  In a sense, you expect that your technology will  make your life or vocation easier.   Your investment in technology provides many returns such as making you more efficient and creating opportunities for you to spend your time on other income producing activities.   Then again, there is email. 

Not only email, but social media, texting, blogging and everything else that technology has brought our way.   How do you keep up with it all?  When do you raise the little white flag in surrender?  Can you honestly read the first paragraph and nod your head yes?  Is technology adding to, or taking away from your income? 

Recently I spent the day with a colleague who utilizes technology and tends to stay on the forward edge of innovation.   This person was having some difficulty with their mail server and Outlook email client.  I sat down to access the problem and was greeted with the following:  4,763 emails in their inbox, 772 emails in their unread mail and about 99 folders set up to theoretically keep everything organized.    Now I realize that this is an extreme case of email overload, but I wonder how many of you might be fighting your own email battles. 

My personal goal is to keep my inbox to no more than 30 emails in it at any given time.  If I’m travelling, it might expand up to 100 or 120 emails over a 24 or 36 hour period.  However as soon as I’m able, I weed through the emails and organize my inbox back down to the manageable 20 to 30.  How do I do it?  I’m glad you asked.

When it comes to email management, here are some rules that I live by:

1.  OHIO – Only handle it once.    Don’t let an email linger in your inbox.  Either act upon it, delete it or archive it.   You can act upon it by replying, forwarding or creating an action item.   After you dealt with the email, you can delete it or file it away in organizational email folders.  These folders can be labeled by business, client, vendor, associate, legal, personal, newsletters, etc.

2.  Set up rules and email folders to automatically file away frequent emails such as newsletters, jokes, friends, family and business emails.  Once the new email arrives, the rules will filter through your inbox and automatically move the email to the folder that you’ve assigned it to.   Set up folders with names such as:  new ideas, follow-up, planning, phone calls, to-do, delegate, etc.

3.  Use the UNREAD email inbox instead of your email inbox.   Once you begin filing away emails through filters and rules; you won’t have as many emails in your inbox, but you also won’t be aware of emails unless you change your email checking habits.  Instead of consulting your inbox folder every few moments, you’ll have to get used to clicking on the unread mail folder.  

4.  Invest in a good junk mail filter, not an off the shelve version, but a server based solution such as Barracuda or Postini.   You’ll notice the difference right away.  There’s not a system that I’m aware of that will get rid of every junk email, with the exception of the verfication systems that send an email back to the sender to verify their contact information such as SpamArrest.   Last month I was doing some server maintenance and found over 6,000 spam emails in my Barracuda filter system.   I’m convinced that the extra investment pays off.

5.  Stop being a slobbering dog.   Of course I’m talking about Pavlov’s dog.  We are so trained to listen for the chime of an incoming email.  Every few moments, we inadvertently stop what we are doing to see who just emailed us.  After all, we wouldn’t want to miss out on that lottery notice, or a new offer for some hair growth supplement.   Turn this notification off in your Outlook by clicking on Tools > Options > Preferences > Email Options > Advanced Options and unclick “play a sound when new mail arrives.”    Increase your productivity by silencing the notification.

During a four hour visit with my colleague we  were able to  clean up Outlook and their inbox.   Only 42 emails remained in the inbox.  Success at last.  What’s your story?  How are you taming the inbox tiger? 

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