My e-mail has been out of control for awhile. Crazy out of control! And as a result, I was not noticing and/or not responding to important ones and watching the pile get higher and higher.
I'm excellent at keeping junk mail that comes in the mailbox out of my home, but e-mail? Crazy.
Part of the issue is the fact that I have five e-mail accounts.
1. One for this blog.
2. One for job hunting and other professional issues.
3. A personal, friends and family only address.
4. Work address for College I
5. Work address for College II.
The other part is the fact that I'd get on in a spare minute, read the e-mail, realize that I did not have time to answer most of them, then forget about them. Bad, bad, bad.
Then I found this wonderful advice from Simple Mom.
Now I have a much better, much less chaotic system that works for me.
Unlike Simple Mom, I did not consolidate my boxes because that does not work for me. I still check all my individual e-mail accounts. Nor did I worry about closing out my e-mail so I would not be distracted by the "ding"- that has not been an issue for me personally.
The real gold for me lay in her problem # 3
Problem #3: I’d read emails, then wait until I had more time to reply to them. This resulted in a backlog of too many emails to ever have time for responding. An in-box full of emails needing a response is not a pretty thing.
Solution: I only read emails when I can give them at least a five sentence response. If I don’t have time for that, I leave it unread. If it seems urgent, then I’ll close out what I was working on and give that email my full attention. If it’s not urgent, then it can wait. The world won’t stop.
Perfect! I've modified it a bit for me- I will read them, but if it is not urgent and I do not have time to give it a response, I move it to a special Reply ASAP folder. Many of my e-mails can be answered in a few words, so doing this and not worrying about the longer ones has greatly cut my clutter. I no longer leave any e-mails in my inbox. They get filed, or responded to and deleted. I go back to my urgent e-mail once a day and respond, then delete. No more clutter!
I also now have a special folder for student work. Many of my students e-mail me their papers, and I was worried that I'd accidentally manage to delete one. One of my colleges sends out billions of announcements and I get a little delete happy. Having the special folder helps me be more careful.
For more WFMW ideas, go here!
3 comments:
I file all of my emails. My goal is to go to bed without anything in my inbox, but there are many times it takes me 3 days to accomplish said goal. I have a file for each of my 3 kids, with subfiles per school, sport, activity. I have personal files, husband files, work files, etc. It has really helped!
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MsFit
I use 3 different e-mail accounts. One for "junk", another for professional & friends, another for another blog. I utilize Outlook and created folders so that certain accounts go to certain folders and I can click on that particular folder if it's important enough to spend some time. I do also check on my phone when I get a spare time and the cool thing is that I can check multiple accounts through one app on the phone so I can just go to the e-mail account that's "more important" (and yes my main blog goes to my prof/friend one so I can keep in touch with my readers).
What works for one might not always work for another so you just need to do what works for you. :-)
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