Managing the Email Blizzard

Tips on Managing the Email Blizzard

Email is both a blessing and a curse. It is a wonderful blessing in that we can now communicate fast economically and immediately. If you get 20-30 emails a day you probably consider it such a blessing. However if you get several hundred emails a day (as I do) it can become a curse and you wish you’d never got an email address. A few years back when I’d say I got more than 100 emails a day (on some few days over 500) my colleagues screwed up their faces and thought I was fibbing. Fewer do now—for some of them now get more than I.

So what does a person do when the email blizzard gets unmanageable?

RADICAL ACTIONS

You may not be so desperate as to need these radical approaches but if you are about to collapse and run off into the woods email-insane consider these:

1. Start fresh. Sometimes when I have more than 500 emails in my in box I celebrate a “year of Jubilee” and wipe out all the email debt in one swoop. I simply start fresh by dragging all of them to a folder marked “refrigerator” or something like that. Once they are all there I send a blanket message to all of them telling them I can’t get to it and if it is an emergency to write back with the word “IMPORTANT in the subject line (Using filters then I see those). I sometimes fish through these to find important people to answer (like my wife or boss) but mostly I just forget them “in the refrigerator” and if they don’t write again they are lost forever. A few months later I note that I never got time to answer them and I just delete them all.

2. Quit email altogether. If you are important enough and “high enough on the ladder” consider leaving email altogether. Do you think the President of the USA answers email? Publish only your administrative assistant’s email address and change your routing on your own email address so that it all goes to your assistant. Let them respond or forward email to the proper person. If it is something YOU need to see they an forward it to you—but do not answer it directly, instead reply back to the assistant who can answer the person like this: I have consulted Dr. Holdren and he wanted me to respond to you with his answer: (include answer). Of course if you do this you will have to have a trusted administrative assistant (THIS is the growth position of the future) and you may want a “private line” email your spouse and kids use or one the President of your institution can use.

3. Let it lie. It seems irresponsible and it is radical surgery of the in box but you could simply drag all you in-basket to a folder and start fresh without telling anyone. The people expecting a reply usually write again anyway with the email uncertainty so just wipe them out as if your computer server got fried anyway (more of a wonderful daydream than a nightmare some days!)

These above are radical solutions to the problem but here are some more reasonable ways to manage email.

INCOMING EMAIL

Use your filters with a vengeance. Learning how to use your mail system’s filters will save you hours of time over the next year. Learn now.

§ Auto-delete with filters many: It only takes a few seconds to delete a message while costing a full minute to make a filter to automatically delete a similar message forever. However the full minute is worth the long term investment. Face it, if you’ve already decided not to buy Viagra online why not simply delete every message automatically with the word Viagra or “free Ipod” or whatever in the subject line or first paragraph—at least divert the message into an folder titled “probably SPAM.” If your spam program cleans out most of these fine, see if you can beat the rest of them. If your email address is posted ANYwhere on the web you’re going to get spam—I get several hundred a day. I treat spam as a crossword puzzle—as a challenge to make another filter that will automatically delete or move any message like this.

§ Set priorities by filtering. All of us have people we consider important—from a boss or ready-to-deliver pregnant daughter. The president of my University, the President-elect, my division chair and my family are important people in my in box. Use your filters to change the color of the message, priority level, to play a sound whenever one of these messages come to you so they don’t get buried. (Occasionally someone is in my offie talking with me and my computer gives a quiet smooching sound—I smile and simply say, “My wife just emailed me” I know when they leave to check (and they sometimes realize they ought to leave sooner). Also my students are my priority so they all know a key word they can put in a subject line that will pop their email to the top of my priority pile. I’ve set my filters to recognize that key student word so they automatically get my attention ahead of others a pastor writing me, or somebody who has read one of my columns.

§ Eliminate email from some domains altogether. Sometimes you have no care whatsoever for mail form some domains—just filter them out completely, or at least set the filters to go automatically into a file to look at later—perhaps over summer. Sure, if you make lots of filters you’ll eventually lose some incoming mail you’d rather have read (your brother kidding you about turning 40 and saying the word “Viagra” in his email) but it is better to lose a few emails than to get buried in a thousand.

Make lots of files. Increasingly email is becoming the primary filing system for workers, especially information workers. If you use filters you’ll probably make lots of files in which to organize things. Make a file to stick notes you really can’t toss, label it “keep this.” If you get stuff you shouldn’t delete but don’t know what to do with, stick it in a file called “hold.” Most administrators have a file called, “Policy.” I use date files like “Sort at Christmas” or “read this summer.” I set a goal to clean up my inbox before eating supper each day—even if I have only moved many messages into files for later reading (one for “tomorrow morning” and the rest to some unnamed file I never get to). An inbox longer than one screen makes you feel constantly behind in your work—that feeling will seep into everything else you do.

Get off your friend’s cute-things mailing list. Some people have too much time on their hands. If they forward cute things to you simply send a courteous note asking to be removed from their list. (This is a great time to use an auto-reply message—see below.)

Answer email immediately when you read it. Most of us hate to do this. We like to read it, nod, then think about it a while or “let it marinate.” It does not marinate—it rots. Answer it at once. Even if you only say, Woah—Gotta think about that.”

Refer email immediately if someone else can answer it. Just click reply and tell them who they should have written to.

Use redirect for outlook to redirect some mail. Redirect is a plug in program which enables you to simply route the incoming email to another person and it appears to them that it came from the original person and not forwarded by you (lots of opportunity for tricks here—avoid those naughty thoughts now!). For instance if someone write to me asking about the worship major (which I used to lead but is now led by Constance Cherry I can redirect it to Constance and when she clicks reply her answer goes directly to the person writing—I am out of the loop. This is the equivalent of thee way we use to treat printed letters—sending on to others to answer. At elast use the forward function to do the same thing.

Answer with a quick question. If someone has written you an extended email that takes more than 30 seconds to read, simply click reply and ask a question for clarification. That puts the ball back on their court and opens up a “conversation”(see below).

Don’t do other people’s work for them. As a professor with more than a thousand articles published on the web I get an email almost every day from students in other colleges asking me questions “for a paper I’m writing.” Basically they want me to do their research for them. I have a clever “sorry-I don’t do library research for students” auto-reply for such students. I’ve noted lower level personnel will sometimes use email to get the bosses to work for them. Just don’t do it. Secretaries are infamous for attaching cute files which you are supposed to print out and return by interoffice mail—saving time for the lower paid employees and transferring that effort to higher paid employees! Don’t do their work for them—paste your answer into an email and make THEM print it out. If you have power in your organization make people stop this wasteful practice.

Don’t answer broadcast emails. It is bad enough for one person to ask another to do their research for them. Its worse when they send a broadcast email to a dozen professors with their list of questions. Email is personal communication not a chat room—it is poor manners and shows a lack of respect for the recipient’s time and an inflated opinion of your own time’s importance. All of us need to band together and discipline such time robbers—an autoreply correction is the best way to do this.

Remove your name from low priority list servers. Perhaps you think you are saving time by simply deleting the messages every time they come rather than unsubscribing. You won’t—eventually it will catch up to you. Remember, you can always subscribe again. At least filter-route them to a file like “read next month.” (I’ve found “next” month never comes—it is a handy device!)

Watch personal & family messages. Your daughter might email you a picture of your grandson; your friend from high school may write telling you what happened at the reunion; your sister could write a long letter telling you about her latest marriage crisis asking advice. These and other personal emails often take up 10% of a worker’s day—and 10% of their salary time. Some companies consider it stealing to use your “company time” for personal emails just as much as it would be to talk a half hour to your sister on the phone, or leave work for an hour each day to do personal errands. This is why some companies restrict personal and family messages and insist that all messages be company related. But most companies live with personal use of their email systems and expect people to work extra or otherwise compensate their personal use of the company email system by evening work. Other companies (more than you’d think) run all email messages through a server loop and someone in power spot reads them periodically to monitor the level and kind of personal correspondence. (If this surprises you remember email is owned by the company and the first rule of email is “Write nothing you’d be uncomfortable at seeing in tomorrow’s paper.”) So, if you get lots of family and personal correspondence, consider scheduling a time to do it once a day—lake maybe ten minutes before the office closes—then if you want to stay an extra hour to give advice to your sister, you’ll be “on your own time.” But, of course, if you are salaried you probably already work 50-60 hours a week, and if you are a minister maybe more, so why not answer personal mail during the day if you are already working most evenings? Just the same, scheduling a time to do personal email is a good idea.

Budget time for second-tier priority email. Most of us get more mail than we can answer. If answering my email were my full time job I could carefully read and answer each. I’d love that—after all, I like to write. But that’s not my day job. I teach college students. So, when I answer many emails I am robbing my students of what they (their parents) have paid for—my time to teach and mentor students. So I can never get to all my email. What I do is set a weekly time to “catch up” on email that is not directly related to my work as a college professor. At once point that time was Sunday afternoon from 1PM to 5PM. During those four hours I could crank through the week’s unread messages pretty fast. What I didn’t get done by 4PM I simply deleted or dragged to the refrigerator. I just can’t give more than four hours a week to answering email outside my primary calling and job. (If you are reading this on the web the chances are some of your emails got routed to this electronic purgatory—sorry, be patient you might get a delayed answer sometime next summer when I occasionally fish through old email like this.

Develop auto-reply messages. Chances are you have some messages you need to send more than once. Messages like “Please take me off your mailing list” or “Sorry but I am buried in email I can’t get to your message for a while.” Some of these can actually be turned into auto replies that are triggered by your filters—though be careful of that practice if you don’t really understand filters. However, if you answer lots of email ask yourself when replying to an email, “Can I use this response again?” As a professor I get lots of student questions that are similar. They ask, “How can I know God’s will for sure?” or “How far can I go with my girlfriend before it is sin?” or “my parents told me they’re splitting—how can God let this happen?” or “I’m losing my faith I think.” All these are questions that I’ll be asked again. So when I answer them I send myself a copy that I can later edit and use again—some have become Tuesday Columns and articles later. Others I store in a “common replies” folder to cut and paste with. I’m not like James Dobson who has roomfuls of people who answer email for him—I have to do this myself, so I’ve got to do what Dobson does: write stock answers to repetitive questions. (In fact this column on email started with a reply to an email on overcoming the email blizzard).

OUTGOING EMAIL

If everybody followed these rules we’d be so much better off—but you can start with yourself—one by one we need to discipline others to follow the conventions in emailing—just like we expect people to drive on the correct side of the road and use their turn signals when turning. Here are some great conventions for outgoing email.

Write a clear subject line. The subject line is your “newspaper headline”—it tells them what the story is going to be about. Anyone can write a story but the headline takes a good writer. Efficient people scan their email’s subject lines to see what you’re after—tell them clearly what you want. A subject line reading “A question” is not as clear as “New agenda item for Tuesday.” I almost always ignore emails that with vague or empty subject lines—I treat them like garbled phone calls—I just hang up.

Use subject prefixes to clarify: If you are sending something “for your information” and no action is needed kick off your subject line with FYI: (topic). Remember busy people trash or file half their emails without even opening them.

Write in the first sentence what you want—don’t wait for the last sentence to say, “All that to ask you this—will you read over my manuscript and help me?” Tell them what you want first, then why you want it or how.

Seldom write more than one screen. Emailing is not letter-writing. Long rambling letters that allow for pondering a week before sending a long detailed answers are from another age—the age when the letter was typed, sealed, and sent by truck-plane-boat to the recipient who had time to ponder it a long while before dictating the answer which a secretary typed up and put in another envelope…well, you get the idea—it is a different world from ours. The most effective email is something like a conversation. It goes back and forth with short interchanges. It is impolite to talk too long without the other person having a chance to get in. Same with emails—if you’ve got more than a screen to say, write a short email introducing your long talk then attach the longer message to the email or paste it in below the short message. According to Jacob Palme (Department of Computer and Systems Sciences; KTH Technical University) the average time it takes to read an email is 30 seconds and the average time it takes to write one is 4 minutes. If you can’t get your message across in 30 seconds you are fried. If you are still treating email like letter-writing, now you know why your messages are getting ignored—email is a conversation not a chance to carry on a filibuster. If you sent an email saying, “I have four questions to ask you” and it isn’t getting answered, this is probably why it languishes in somebody’s inbox. You’d probably be better off asking one question in a single sentence then letting them respond asking you for more information, which opens up a conversation. Asking several questions becomes “homework” for the recipient—and they put it off and finally never get to it. If you really must ask three questions—send three emails. Better, open a conversation.

Make sure you aren’t asking people to be your secretary. Lots of emails originate because people are too lazy to look it up things already posted for them on the web. These writers are like me. When I want to spell a word I’m not sure about, I call out to my wife, “How do you spell eloquent?” Sometimes she gives me the answer (but mostly she says, “Go look it up”) Same with email. I regularly delete emails from people asking me to do their webwork for them. They ask, “Have you written anything on divorce?” or “Do you have any writing on restitution?” I just delete these emails without responding. I am not their secretary or spouse—if they cannot use the search engine on my web site by typing in the word “divorce” or “restitution” then I have no time for them. These are lazy people and even once they’ve read the article they probably won’t act on it. I will not be a secretary to lazy pastors or past students looking for sermon material. To do so would be to rob present students who have “bought and paid for” my time. When I delete these requests I mutter, “go look it up for yourself” under my breath. But more recently I simply write back with the following autoreply: “Good question: let me know what you find using the web’s search engines.”

These are a few email tips for starters. They are not complete but they are a start to managing the email blizzard.

By Keith Drury 11/1/2005