Managing Email
Some links that I’ve come across in the last while…
43 Folders - Five fast email productivity tips
- simple and to the point:
- Shut off auto-check
- Pick off easy ones – if you can respond right away in one or two lines, do it now
- Write less – keep it short, quick, and to the point
- Cheat – use templates and boilerplate responses for common inquiries
- Be honest – if you know you’re not going to deal with an email, just get rid of it
John Porcaro: mktg@msft - Microsoft’s Email Culture
- Porcaro talks about the high volumes of email that staff at Microsoft contend with, shares a few of his own email management tricks, including:
- your inbox is not your to-do list
- block out time to “process” email
- don’t use email as your filing system
- don’t use email as a CMS – put content that needs to be shared in a place accessible to all
NPR - Overcoming E-Mail Overload at Work
- includes an audio interview with Marilyn Paul, author of It’s Hard To Make a Difference When You Can’t Find Your Keys, who offers several tips for dealing with email effectively at work, including:
- Meet as a team to review e-mail use. Identify what works, what doesn’t, and why.
- Don’t deliver bad news in an e-mail message.
- After two rounds of problem-solving on e-mail, pick up the phone.
- If you can’t answer a request immediately, let the other party know when you can respond, or if you can’t.
- there’s also an excerpt of Paul’s book available here (PDF, 122 kb)
Good Experience - Managing Incoming E-mail: What Every User Needs to Know (PDF, 317 kb)
Here is how to manage incoming e-mail: Keep the inbox empty.
- the report (which is 38 pages long) goes on to include:
- a walkthrough on how to empty your current inbox
- tips on how to spot spam in your inbox quickly, so that you can delete it right away
- suggestions for setting up mail filters
- instructions on setting up filters in Microsoft Outlook
Conversations with Dina - Spam killing Email - why can’t they learn from IM ?
- Dina talks about using whitelist applications and has a wishlist for a permission-based contact management protocol/structure for email
BBC News - E-mail is the new database
- obviously a lot of people could use the tips noted in the preceding articles – as the BBC reports:
Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL Mail on the Web are becoming databases by default as a growing number of people use them, to store data and photos so they can retrieve them from anywhere.
Update 18 February 2005: Here’s one more…
USATODAY.com - How the big names tame e-mail
- Email secrets of the rich and famous include:
- don’t read it
- get an assistant
- use multiple email addresses
- use a wireless solution, like a Blackberry, to handle email anytime, anywhere
- (via Brain Food Blog)
Update #2, 18 February 2005: This just in…
43 Folders - Quick tips on processing your email inbox
- Merlin Mann follows up on his five email productivity tips (see above) with these notes:
Processing determines as quickly as possible what, if anything, to do with each piece (in ascending order of urgency and importance):
- delete it
- archive it
- defer it for later response
- generate an action from it
- respond to it immediately (if it—literally—will take less than 2 minutes or is so Earth-shattering that it just can’t wait)