In this chapter we have gone through quite a journey. Hopefully, along the way you’ve learned that your whole life probably shouldn’t be about email.

Here is a quick reference you can print out:

• Inbox Power hour
  • 1-10m: Quick Sort from top to bottom
  • 11M-20M: Emails from NOT People
  • 21-30m: Emails to NOT you
  • 31-40m: Unread email
  • 41-50m: To me from a real person
  • 51-60m: Closeout
• Control the Flow Out
  • Send Fewer emails
  • Delay sending emails
  • Don’t Hit reply all unless you have to
  • Use Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) more
  • Use drafts and notes to build up information for people, and send one email instead of many.
  • Give yourself time to back out by delaying email.
  • Have a meeting, phone call, or chat instead.
  • Make your important emails different
  • Communicate what you need from someone clearly
  • Add context when forwarding emails
• Control the Flow of Email in
  • Unsubscribe from things
  • Turn off notifications
  • Move it to something else
  • Mark it as junk
• Make a system
  • Morning 10-minute email triage and delete FYIs
  • Schedule 1 hour a day to deal with TODO emails. Last in first out if you can.
  • Schedule 1 hour to read the Read Later emails.
  • Set up a consistent schedule that works for you.
• Control Your Attention
  • Control when you check. Once an hour? Twice a day? Once a day?
  • Close your email for most of the day
  • Ask for urgent emails to be sent differently

Credit

Content copied from Personal Email Management by Joy Perrin published by Texas Tech University Libraries under a CC BY-NC license.