The Overflowing Inbox
Managing your inbox while you're away.
Managing your inbox while you're away.
This week I wanted to look at a different type of e-mail best practice: managing your own inbox while you’re away.
I’m writing this three days into vacation. I had worked like crazy the entire week before vacation (as most of us do), trying to clean up everything that needed to be done while I was gone so I could enjoy my time off. This meant cleaning out my e-mail box, rescheduling meetings, and getting deliverables turned in, in advance. By the time I was on the road, I was pretty darn happy with myself and expected a smooth ride.
Three days later, I’m pleasantly surprised. Nothing major has blown up, meetings are taking place as needed, and the people covering for me are doing a fantastic job. I wish I could say the same for my poor e-mail inbox.
Just 72 hours into a break, I have 747 unread e-mail messages. This volume makes it almost impossible to scroll through to look for urgent messages to read. I took the time to sort them by sender to see who was spamming me. What I found was pretty interesting:
Unfortunately, in these small buckets of messages lie some of the most critical communications: “Your benefits program is changing,” “The RFP response date was changed,” “There’s a call tomorrow with the CEO.”
So how can you control your own inbox when you’re not looming over it 24 hours a day? Here are some of the best tips I’ve found to be effective:
I don’t think these recommendations would permanently solve my incoming e-mail volume, but I bet they would have enabled me to have a less stressful scroll through the inbox upon return. One question still remains, though: how do you deal with the senseless “reply-to-alls”? If anyone has a good idea on this, I’d love to hear it.
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