I’ve been dealing with email for about 20 years now and the amount of email that I (and everyone) receive has increased over that time. In addition, the email has become more and more important. It’s no longer forwarding of jokes, continuing chain letters, or just quick “hello” messages, it is absolutely vital to businesses these days.
Unfortunately people are having a hard time dealing with the deluge of email they receive. For many, every email is extremely important and when you receive 100+ email messages a day, your entire day is spent dealing with email. So some people simply just don’t read or respond to email. This, of course, creates a problem for others that rely on replies. In extreme cases, I’ve heard of people that go on vacation and when they return, send out a message saying that they deleted all their email (on purpose) and to resend anything that is important.
I’m probably in the minority in that I handle a large amount of email everyday with very little effort. My strategy for dealing with email is quite simple. I go with the inbox zero principle in that every message that I haven’t dealt with stays in the Inbox and I try to clear it everyday. Next, I skim subjects and to/cc recipients. If the message is unimportant, like out of the office or “free tomatoes”, it immediately goes in the trash. If I’m in the to/cc line, I spend a few extra minutes on the message and see if I need to act on it. If I do, I try to act on it quickly so that I don’t forget about it. If I’m not in the to/cc line, I see if the subject is something I need and then skim the first part of the message (I’m also a fan of “top quoting” where the most recent part of a message is at the top of the message). I’ll act on it, if necessary and then move on.
I also deal with email throughout the day so that it doesn’t pile up. It also doesn’t hurt that I have very good time management skills and can handle a large amount of data at a time.
Maybe I should hone my skills a bit and start teaching classes “how to deal with email quickly and effectively”.