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.