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O.K., it’s about time that I get to the nitty-gritty of this thing. When you receive a message, something has to be done with it or your Inbox will begin to fill up again. I’ve got some suggestions:
Four Different Options for Email
Now that you’ve jumped on this bandwagon and created the email workspace that we talked about very early in this process (if not, now’s a good time to do that). We’ve also gone over some rules for handling the messages, so we’re ready to move on. With this foundation, it doesn’t matter whether you have 50, 500 or 5000 messages in your inbox (trust me, I can introduce you to people that would think an inbox with only 5000 messages is an unattainable goal), you should be able to follow these next four handling options and get it down to 0 in no time.
There are four options for email handling that you need to know about:
1. Messages requiring no action
2. Messages requiring actions that take less than two minutes
3. Messages requiring actions that take longer than two minutes (I’ll handle this in my next blog)
4. Messages containing information you need to keep
When No Action is Required
Lots of emails fall into this category and require no action. For example, spam. These are easy. Delete and move on.
Quick Handling: The Two-Minute Rule
Lots of messages fall into this category. If you have a message that can be handled in two minutes or less, do it right away. So a quick FYI email should get a quick look, and then be deleted. Or when someone asks for info that is readily available to you, you should respond right away and delete the email. Please don’t miss the recurring theme here: When you are done with an email, delete it! If you think you need to store a message for later reference, that’s a special case that we’ll address later. But for now, create another working folder called “Hold,” (if you haven’t already) and put those emails in there.
Handling Emails with Information You Need to Keep
Sometimes emails don’t contain any actions but do contain information that we will need to keep on file or refer to later. Some messages that require some action contain this type of information as well. What do we do with these emails?
There are two types of storing we need to do when it comes to this type of message. The first is when you need to keep the message itself, or its attachments. The second is when you just need to keep a few pieces of information from the email.
When You Need to Keep the Email Itself or an Attachment
Some don’t believe in creating email folders. I won’t go quite that far, but I will tell you that there are better ways to accomplish this “kept” message data. The “Readers Digest” version is that it takes a lot of time to file every email, or even a large percentage of them. This is a tough one for most people to lay hold of but the truth is, only the most important emails should be filed. Nope, that’s NOT anything close to ALL of them. With that being said, if you decide that a particular message is worthy of keeping (one of those “most important” messages), it should be filed in with the rest of your computer files — in your “Documents” folder, not in your email client software.
If you subscribe to this theory, when you need to keep a message for future reference, go up to the File > Save As command and save it into the relevant section of your “Documents” folder. Or drag it to your desktop, navigate to the relevant section of your “Documents” folder, and drag it in. You can do the same thing with any attachments that you choose to keep as well. The key principle here is that you should have only one filing system on your computer, not two (”Documents” only, not “Documents” and also email). This is much more simple, and keeps things stored on one location, thus giving you one place to search when you need something. For example, it is much easier when working on a project simply to have everything in your project folder in the “Documents” section of your computer, rather than also having to go look at your email files.
Maybe it seems like more work to file an email in “Documents” rather than just a folder in your email program. But this gets to the other principle: You should only be filing very few emails. We just don’t have the time to file a ton of messages. Keep it just to the most important. Then, it makes sense to keep the files all together over in “Documents.”
When You Just Need to Keep Some Details from the Email
Sometimes you don’t need to keep the whole email… just some part of it, for example. This is starting to get much more sophisticated, but in those instances you should have a project plan for the project to which the message pertains. Then, you just paste into the project plan the important principles that you need to keep on your radar during the project.
A simpler example is when someone emails you with a meeting time, and instead of sending an invite they just send a regular email. In this case, create the calendar item and delete the email. Or if they send you details you need for an event or meeting. put those details in the note section of the calendar item right away.
Come back tomorrow for some direction on how to handle the messages that take a bit longer to address.
Thanks,
Roger