If you rely on email as part of your business, you probably dread coming back from holiday to hundreds or thousands of emails. The thought of spending the first week dealing with them all and feeling that you’re having to catch up all the time. Clare Evans, author of Time Management for Dummies, shares a few quick steps to help you deal with the backlog.
Once you’ve planned out the important things you need to get done on your first day back, set aside an hour to go through your inbox. Yes, I know it’s probably going to take much longer than that but it’s just the start.
Go through quickly and eliminate the spam and any email you know you don’t need to read. Use the sort function to sort your email by sender or subject, which makes it easier to delete the junk. DON’T READ OR RESPOND TO ANY EMAILS ON THIS SCAN.
You won’t have time to read everything that’s come in while you’re away, so delete anything that doesn’t require your attention or have information you absolutely MUST have. Don’t save it ‘just in case’.
Pick out all the priority emails you need to respond to first and place them in a separate ‘Action’ folder or flag them. You should be able to complete these two scans pretty quickly.
Set aside time in your schedule to respond to your ‘Action’ emails. Respond to any Urgent emails if you still have time remaining. You should still have a reasonable chunk of time left. If not set aside more time later in the day if needed.
If you still have time, do the third scan, otherwise leave that until the next time you’re scheduled to work on your email.
Allow yourself a few minutes to take a quick look at any new emails — in case there is anything really important that needs attention, but I mean a ‘few minutes’. Don’t get distracted!
If your filters haven’t already sorted out reading emails, now is the time to place all of these in the appropriate folder(s).
Deal with what’s left. Less urgent action emails can now be dealt with. What’s left? If it’s not action or reading — it’s probably not urgent so can be deleted.
Once you’ve safely dealt with the backlog that came in while you were away — you can now apply the same process to the new emails that have come in.
I then use filters to sort these into folders.
Switch any email groups to special notices or admin only. You can do this for all Yahoo groups and most online discussion/networking groups. This will reduce the volume coming through in the first place so you have less to deal with.
