Steve Davies Online

E-mails have probably overtaken the telephone now as the most dangerously effective of all Time Bandits. When it was first introduced, e-mail represented a huge opportunity for improved communication. It is now reached the point where far from being a communication tool it is simply a bandit of huge proportions.

The problem with e-mail ties back into the point I made when I was talking about software training, and so many people simply do not know what the technology can do for them to help them manage their e-mail environment more effectively.  

As with the telephone issue, there are some simple operational things that can be done to manage how and when you access e-mail. In addition, there are some "technical" solutions that can really help you control what hits your in box.  

Simple operational things 

·         Turn off the e-mail alert. New e mail is almost always more interesting than what you were doing, and allows you the opportunity to simply move away from what is important to answer something trivial, interesting and easy to do. Do not let it pop up as a distraction!

·         Only answer e-mails during downtime. As with phone calls, batch and only respond outside of prime time and quiet time.

·         If you have a staff, have somebody screen the e-mails for you in the same way that you would have screen on the telephone   

Technical solutions to control your in box 

·         Use spam filters and junk mail. I am not sure about white lists and ways to keep people from communicating with you, as you never know who may be interesting, and somebody that you really want to talk to. I have become a big fan of the outlook "junk e-mail" folder. I think that is wrongly named, but I am now using it as a place to put all the things that I might be interested in but really do not want to see during my prime time.

·         Use e-mail filtering rules. These are simple to set up in outlook, and I have been able to reduce the clutter in my inbox substantially as a result. For instance, I put all my newsletters so that they automatically go into a "newsletters" file, and I look at it during downtime on my timetable rather than the timetable of the person that sent it to me.

·         Set up multiple e-mail addresses, with all important mail going to one master address. In this way, you can filter by the address to which the e-mail was originally sent and eliminate those that you perceive to be junk. 

The big danger with the e-mail rules is that you may miss important e-mails because they go to a folder that you simply overlook. The way to avoid this is to put the folders where you are automatically directing e-mail at the top of your list of e-mail folders, and there are two ways in which you can do this. 

First, you can put specific folders in your "favorites" folder at the very top of your e-mail list. My "favorites" folder has junk mail along with "inbox", "sent" and "deleted", and I also put my "events" folder there. And that is the folder I used to put all of the e-mails regarding events which I'm considering attending or travel arrangements that I am making so that I can easily find them.  

Immediately underneath the "Mail" is where the inbox folder reside. What I have found is that it is really important to put the folders where you have created rules so that they appear at the top of your list and have less chance of being overlooked. 

You will see that anything that has gone into these folders automatically shows the number of unopened items in parentheses after the title, and in that way I know if there are new e-mails are automatically gone into the folders that I have not yet looked at.

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