15 Tips for Staying on Top of Your Inbox

Email remains a favoured tool for collaboration in Europe. But beyond a certain level, electronic messaging ceases to have a positive impact on productivity. At a time when everyone wants to make best use of their time at work, here are some productivity-improving tips for handling email overload:

• Divert all email on which you have been copied into a buffer directory (I called mine the purgatory). Most of the time I find that there isn't much point in keeping most of these messages anyway,
• Mail over six months old isn't very useful either. I either delete it or archive it, but I realised that I very seldom go back to email messages after one or two months at the most. Otherwise, build a wiki or a Sharepoint space.
• All messages should be sorted promptly into categories, such as:
  
  • Actionable -- something's got to be done, more or less urgently.
  • Information -- it has to be read swiftly and sorted out immediately.
  • Commercial -- either relevant or spam.
  • Irrelevant -- it has to be deleted.
  • Inappropriate -- often too long and better replaced with a short phone conversation.
  • Downright abusive -- messages in which people voice complaints or grievances in public and preferably by copying a lot of other people. Either discard them or try to talk to that person directly.

• Don't send email late at night. Midnight messages don't prove you are a dedicated professional, but suggest that you are badly organised. In some businesses (Microsoft is one), the system would not even let you do this since it is considered inappropriate behaviour to send email outside of business hours.
• Send fewer messages and you'll receive fewer. It's that simple.
• Don't write email messages longer than two paragraphs (read Joe Robinson's e-tool bill of rights),
• If you are using Outlook, avoid the 'send immediately when connected' option,
• Avoid leaving your mailbox open all day long and devote special time for email use rather than checking it on a continuous basis, since this is very disruptive,
• If you receive a message longer than two paragraphs, a quick phone call or an instant message might solve the issue in a much better way than a long-winded written response,
• Don't use email to store files. Instead, use wikis, Sharepoint spaces, Google docs, or similar enterprise technologies such as bluekiwi,
• Never ever use email to set up meetings unless coupled with an email calendar. Use http://doodle.ch instead or even directly within Facebook by adding the applet,
• Writing contracts or performing other complex tasks which involve several participants is not compatible with email messaging. Instead, web conferencing should be used in order to enable people to work together on the same document and update it in real time,
• Sending large files and bulky attached files is not always a good option. use wikis instead,
• Avoid asking open or complex questions via email. First resort to IM or phone.
• Keep all personal emails in a separate mailbox, and preferably via Webmail (not just a matter of productivity, but also a matter of protecting your privacy).

Email can be very useful but, wrongly used, it could easily have a negative impact on your productivity.

You can read more about bad email use at work here:

• 12 worst practices of e-mail usage in the workplace
• The Hamster Revolution