Email can get out of control for anyone. Professionals get emails from friends, family, and so many companies trying to gain our attention. Often emails are unfiltered, and your email address is an open door for anyone to contact you: some you want, many you don’t. As your email volume grows, this can reduce productivity, distract us from what is important, and generate frustration. I like to remove the alerts and mental noise of many emails in my inbox by implementing the inbox zero methodologies. I also value my time to the point that I want to minimize the time spent reviewing emails by proactively managing email volume. Here are six techniques to manage email overload:
Purge
To get started, go into your inbox and clean it up so you can start fresh. Just go through the long list of unread emails and place them in an archive. If you have unread emails older than 60 days, are you going to read them? One good technique is to select a range of emails that are more than 60 days old or even 30 days old and then drag them into a folder you can label as “old email archive.” The purge keeps the emails if you need to reference them but moves these stagnant emails away from your inbox so you can start fresh with our next steps. Mark all as read, and this will declutter your inbox.
Reduce
If you are active with emails, your volume can get out of control. The time you spend with emails is proportional to the number of emails you get per day and the time you spend with each one. So let’s first address the number of emails: drive that number of emails down with intent. Unsubscribe methodically and daily. If you know who the sender is, click the unsubscribe link so you stop receiving regular specials and promotional emails. If it’s not important, why let it clutter your inbox? When the email is from an unknown sender, I don’t want to risk my cybersecurity, so place a block on the sender or send it to your junk email. It takes time at first, but keeping a clean inbox is important. I make it is a daily goal to unsubscribe from at least one unimportant email sender per day.
Another way to reduce emails is to reduce the number of replies. If you engage in email conversations and join threads, be prepared. Your volume will increase. For our intraoffice communication, we did away with email and use communication tools such as Slack and Meistertask. Calendar apps such as Calendly, Doodle, or others can also reduce back and forth if you are on an email thread to pick a time to meet. This back and forth via email is inefficient and increases the volume of emails unnecessarily.
Delegate
Many emails come from reps and vendors who want direct contact with the orthodontist since you are often the decision-maker. Delegate decisions onto key team members and remove these emails from your inbox. Empower and assign connections between supporting companies and the source person in your team who handles these tasks. If the email is important, but you have a source person who needs to manage this task, then forward it to them and do a handoff intro to the sender advising them to assign this to your team member.
Automate
Some emails we may want to keep for reference, but they don’t need our daily attention. Most email services will allow you to set up rules on how we manage email workflow. You can select emails received from a particular sender, and it contains certain keywords, it can automatically move to a mailbox of your choice. One example of this is receipts I receive for auto payments. I like to keep the receipt for reference, but I don’t need to read these, so they automatically go into my “receipts” mailbox by setting up this software routine.
Respond
Once you have your number of emails under better control, now the clutter is reduced, and you can focus on the important emails that need attention. We can flag particular contacts to receive notifications, but this becomes much easier when the overall volume of emails is manageable. My rule of thumb for response is that I will likely respond right away if it takes two minutes or less. Quick replies save a tremendous amount of time from re-reading an email at a later time point. Doing things twice is inefficient, but sometimes emails have a poor explanation in the subject line or will take a long time to read. It helps to understand if the email is a request, question, task, or long-winded response. As a general rule, I answer quickly to direct questions and emails that are to the point. Spend less time responding to manage your email overload.
Defer
Some emails will take much longer than a quick reply. They may be a newsletter or a lengthy response that is an interesting read. Many emails are the beginning of a set of tasks or a part of an ongoing project. In these cases, we set up a system for deferring the email into a task management application. Within our practice, we move task and project-based email communication into a project management app such as Meistertask. It is much more efficient and effective than email threads, where people can get lost.
Suppose a quick reply is not possible to an involved email. In that case, I have an automated email parsing process using my project management software to sort these emails into “do today,” “do this week,” or “future” tasks. This technique to defer allows me to control the emails and address them when I schedule this work.
