You can’t always make snap decisions about keeping or discarding emails, but can organize what to look at and when, keeping your main email box clear. Within your e-mail and personal information management software product, such as “Outlook,” try this approach:

1. Create a minimal number of folders within the email database: Get Back To Them, Training & Development, Contacts’ Changes, Computer Corrections, Order Receipts.  These should pretty well encompass what you’ll receive by email.  Get Back to Them should be your highest priority folder.  The next three will likely require action within a limited time period, so check it regularly.  Order Receipts is to file your copy of anything ordered online.  Keep your main email area as clear as possible.  Refrain from creating any additional side files unless they’re temporary.

2.  Decide when and how often you’ll check your emails.  Control it – don’t let it control you.

3.  If you’re experiencing information overload, let clients (and friends and family) know you review your emails on certain days, so they’ll be prompted to use the phone if they need you for something more urgently.

4.  Be sure and tell anyone making appointments with you that these are best set or confirmed by phone, as not all emails get through and you would not want to miss their communication. 

5.  Ask associates to use descriptive subject lines that prompt you to view their more important items first.

6.  When you’re reviewing your email, only open those you have time for and that appear from the subject line to be most important.  Move other emails to their designated folders to review at the end of the day or next day.  We can be too easily distracted by taking action on something new when we’re supposed to be completing something we’ve already begun.”  The key is to be disciplined in sticking to the system once you’ve created it.

What are your ideas for managing your emails?

In the U.S., over $56 billion is spent on the production and distribution of more than 41.5 billion pieces of mail advertisements, according to the Worldwatch Institute.    It’s not dubbed “snail mail” just because it takes longer to reach us, but because it can slow us down – if we let it.  You can control some of it through the information of stop the junk mail’s website: http://www.ecocycle.org/junkmail/index.cfm.  But you don’t always have control over what comes to you.  Here’s what you can do in sorting it through: 

Use the  “20-10-70 rule” to help you discern media’s relevance and what to keep or toss:

-20% is: a.  applicable to you right now or will be within the next three months.  b.   information you can’t get again.  requires specific action you will take within the next three months.

-10% is:  a.   informative for learning and development.   b.  Limit your reading to the a/b/c rules above.   c.  beware of too many magazines, newspapers or books that pile up and cause undue stress and forced reading, distracting you from your primary reading. 

-70% is where most paperwork and info needs to end up rather than take up precious space on your office desk or bedroom night stand, – the trash can.  

 Information can be liberating, but it can also be a ball and chain if you don’t manage it well.     

What are some methods you’ve found helpful in managing snail mail?