Ten steps to take control of your inbox

Most organizations don’t manage their email very well – and there are any number of white papers out there about how to archive everything, or how to manage email messages as records, or the value of outsourcing email, etc. But very few of them address the reason why email is so out of control – us! Most of us don’t use email very effectively, whether on an individual message basis or in managing our inboxes. So the focus of this article is on steps you can take to be more effective in how you use email.

1. Close your email client. The vast majority of us keep our email client open all day long, just in case an important message comes in. This leaves us vulnerable to distraction every time a message comes in, whether it’s that important note from the boss, an invitation to a webinar that may or may not be of interest, or an update on next week’s potluck.

2. Turn off alerts. If you can’t close your email client you can minimize it, but it doesn’t help if it pops up an alert every time one of those messages comes in. So turn off the alerts. If you don’t want to turn them off completely because you might miss an important email, set up specific alerts for, say, messages from your boss or the project team you’re working with.

3. Set specific times to check your email. Some argue NOT to check your email first thing in the morning – because you’ll look up and find you’ve already wasted hours on it. Others insist they have to check it first in case something urgent came up overnight. Regardless, by setting up times and adhering to them, you’ll greatly reduce the distraction of email.

4. Reduce colleague spam, both what you send and what you receive. This means paying attention to the CC: and especially BCC: functionality. Consider whether someone really needs to be informed of the contents of the message or if it’s just an exercise in covering yourself. This is especially true when it comes to the “Reply All” button, which is so abused that some organizations have taken the step of configuring their email systems to turn that capability off. If your staff CC:s you on everything, consider whether you actually read those CC:ed messages; if you don’t, maybe they shouldn’t be cluttering up your inbox.

5. Reduce attachment spam. Just as not everyone in the organization needs to receive a copy of a given message, not everyone in the thread needs to receive all the attachments associated with the thread. Attachments can take up a lot of space in the inbox; more importantly, as attachments proliferate it becomes increasingly difficult to determine which one is the most current. One way to address both of these concerns is to send links rather than attachments. This can also ensure that attachments cannot be forwarded to people who shouldn’t see them – the user who clicks on the link can be made to log in in order to access the file.

6. Touch each message only once. This is the hallmark of the email management = time management movement as espoused by David Allen’s Getting Things Done, Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero, and many others. The point is to act on a message when you get it: file it, respond to it, take action related to it, defer it for a specific response, delete it, etc. The usual caveats about records management apply; the point is that you don’t keep all your email in the inbox until it becomes too overwhelming.

7. Use meaningful subject lines. Blank subject lines often end up in the Junk Mail or Spam folder. But too often the subject line is either very generic, such as “Stuff”, “Friday”, “Our discussion from yesterday”, etc. – or it’s the same subject line from 20 messages ago, even though the focus of the discussion has changed several times in the interim. Almost all email clients can follow threads without keeping the subject line the same. Better subject lines also lead to better responsiveness because the recipient can determine how quickly a response is needed and can be provided. And better subject lines make it easier to locate a message later should it become necessary.

8. Don’t use email as a filing cabinet. Too many of us keep all of our email because that’s where our documents live – as attachments. Some will even email documents to themselves, creating attachments in order to save them in the email system. Email systems are designed to send, route, receive, and store messages for short periods; they are not designed to be the final repository for information. The more email stored, the worse the system performs, which is why email archiving was initially so popular. They are not designed to optimize findability. And it is extraordinarily difficult to use them to manage messages that should be treated as records. Finally, many organizations still have mailbox size limits, and when that limit is reached because of the volume of attachments stored, too many users simply delete by size rather than by value or importance.

9. Reduce the amount of bacn you consume. Bacn is a term coined in 2007 to describe “email you want, but not right now.” It refers to updates from vendors, announcements from your local ARMA or AIIM chapter, the Dilbert cartoon-of-the-day, etc. It’s not spam, but if you can’t get to it, it won’t directly impact your job. I was the poster boy for this and at one time I was receiving more than 400 emails a day. Today I have unsubscribed from almost all of those sources and my inbox is usually good for about 50 messages a day, with more than 90% of them being directly work-related. And I still get the information I need, because I…

10. Use the right tool for the job. Email is a horrible tool for most of the uses we put it to. Consider how users collaborate through email: it’s a flurry of attachment spam, “did you get my email?” messages, “which is the right version?” traffic, etc. Wikis are much better tools for collaboration. Or consider all the broadcast-type announcements you get, whether from vendors, your HR staff, or your friendly neighborhood association chapter. Blogs (and more recently Twitter) are a great way to stay informed about that type of information without having it clutter your inbox. That’s how I get my information. It’s not that email is a bad tool – it’s just that what it’s really good for is one-to-one or one-to-few communication. Use other tools for other uses.

Most organizations don’t manage their email very well – and there are any number of white papers out there about how to archive everything, or how to manage email messages as records, or the value of outsourcing email, etc. But very few of them address the reason why email is so out of control – us! Most of us don’t use email very effectively, whether on an individual message basis or in managing our inboxes. So the focus of this article is on steps you can take to be more effective in how you use email.

1. Close your email client. The vast majority of us keep our email client open all day long, just in case an important message comes in. This leaves us vulnerable to distraction every time a message comes in, whether it’s that important note from the boss, an invitation to a webinar that may or may not be of interest, or an update on next week’s potluck.

2. Turn off alerts. If you can’t close your email client you can minimize it, but it doesn’t help if it pops up an alert every time one of those messages comes in. So turn off the alerts. If you don’t want to turn them off completely because you might miss an important email, set up specific alerts for, say, messages from your boss or the project team you’re working with.

3. Set specific times to check your email. Some argue NOT to check your email first thing in the morning – because you’ll look up and find you’ve already wasted hours on it. Others insist they have to check it first in case something urgent came up overnight. Regardless, by setting up times and adhering to them, you’ll greatly reduce the distraction of email.

4. Reduce colleague spam, both what you send and what you receive. This means paying attention to the CC: and especially BCC: functionality. Consider whether someone really needs to be informed of the contents of the message or if it’s just an exercise in covering yourself. This is especially true when it comes to the “Reply All” button, which is so abused that some organizations have taken the step of configuring their email systems to turn that capability off. If your staff CC:s you on everything, consider whether you actually read those CC:ed messages; if you don’t, maybe they shouldn’t be cluttering up your inbox.

5. Reduce attachment spam. Just as not everyone in the organization needs to receive a copy of a given message, not everyone in the thread needs to receive all the attachments associated with the thread. Attachments can take up a lot of space in the inbox; more importantly, as attachments proliferate it becomes increasingly difficult to determine which one is the most current. One way to address both of these concerns is to send links rather than attachments. This can also ensure that attachments cannot be forwarded to people who shouldn’t see them – the user who clicks on the link can be made to log in in order to access the file.

6. Touch each message only once. This is the hallmark of the email management = time management movement as espoused by David Allen’s Getting Things Done, Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero, and many others. The point is to act on a message when you get it: file it, respond to it, take action related to it, defer it for a specific response, delete it, etc. The usual caveats about records management apply; the point is that you don’t keep all your email in the inbox until it becomes too overwhelming.

7. Use meaningful subject lines. Blank subject lines often end up in the Junk Mail or Spam folder. But too often the subject line is either very generic, such as “Stuff”, “Friday”, “Our discussion from yesterday”, etc. – or it’s the same subject line from 20 messages ago, even though the focus of the discussion has changed several times in the interim. Almost all email clients can follow threads without keeping the subject line the same. Better subject lines also lead to better responsiveness because the recipient can determine how quickly a response is needed and can be provided. And better subject lines make it easier to locate a message later should it become necessary.

8. Don’t use email as a filing cabinet. Too many of us keep all of our email because that’s where our documents live – as attachments. Some will even email documents to themselves, creating attachments in order to save them in the email system. Email systems are designed to send, route, receive, and store messages for short periods; they are not designed to be the final repository for information. The more email stored, the worse the system performs, which is why email archiving was initially so popular. They are not designed to optimize findability. And it is extraordinarily difficult to use them to manage messages that should be treated as records. Finally, many organizations still have mailbox size limits, and when that limit is reached because of the volume of attachments stored, too many users simply delete by size rather than by value or importance.

9. Reduce the amount of bacn you consume. Bacn is a term coined in 2007 to describe “email you want, but not right now.” It refers to updates from vendors, announcements from your local ARMA or AIIM chapter, the Dilbert cartoon-of-the-day, etc. It’s not spam, but if you can’t get to it, it won’t directly impact your job. I was the poster boy for this and at one time I was receiving more than 400 emails a day. Today I have unsubscribed from almost all of those sources and my inbox is usually good for about 50 messages a day, with more than 90% of them being directly work-related. And I still get the information I need, because I…

10. Use the right tool for the job. Email is a horrible tool for most of the uses we put it to. Consider how users collaborate through email: it’s a flurry of attachment spam, “did you get my email?” messages, “which is the right version?” traffic, etc. Wikis are much better tools for collaboration. Or consider all the broadcast-type announcements you get, whether from vendors, your HR staff, or your friendly neighborhood association chapter. Blogs (and more recently Twitter) are a great way to stay informed about that type of information without having it clutter your inbox. That’s how I get my information. It’s not that email is a bad tool – it’s just that what it’s really good for is one-to-one or one-to-few communication. Use other tools for other uses.

Tagline: Jesse Wilkins is a Principal Consultant with Access Sciences. For more information about email, electronic records management, or Twitter, contact him at jwilkins@accesssciences.com or on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/jessewilkins.

The purpose of this blog.

I started this blog for a couple of reasons. The one of most importance to anyone reading it is that I will use this to publish articles of interest to the broader information management community and make them available for syndication. What that means is that anything I publish here can be re-used for chapter newsletters, websites, blogs, etc. subject to a couple of minor caveats:

1. If you use it, you attribute it back to me. You don’t have to link back to this blog, though that’d be nice, but I don’t like people stealing. If I find my articles on another blog without attribution, I will ask nicely that you attribute it, then I will ask nicely that you delete it, then I will open up.
2. Sometimes things on here are reworkings of things I have published elsewhere – and vice versa. So I may publish something for, say, Infonomics or Information Management that is very similar to something here. I will generally note that in the post someplace.

Couple of other reasons I started this. First, lots of folks start blogs on Blogger and then move to WP because of its flexibility. I, too, want more flexibility than I think Blogger currently provides, and this is my sandbox to see if I might also want to move Informata here. In addition, I sometimes help others with setting up blogs and so I need to get more familiar with WP.

Anyway, that’s the idea. Questions? Comments? Email me.