The technology marketing research firm Radicati predicts that this year the average office worker will send and receive about 199 emails per day. Think about that: nearly 200 separate units, each requiring your attention. Even if you delete an email without reading it, that process in itself requires you to (1) make a decision, and (2) take action.

Maybe that’s why Radicati also predicts that the average office worker will spend a whopping 41% of each work day managing email.

For many of us, a concomitant problem exists with email delivery. If we keep our email client open (Windows Live, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc.), we’re constantly barraged and distracted by the arrival of new email. I can’t find any statistics about the percentage of people who elect to have a sound announce email’s delivery, but I imagine the numbers are high on the pro-sound side.

So what to do?

Email Delivery

One of the best solutions for not letting email delivery interfere with your work is to simply close your email client. Then you’re not tempted to stop working every time a new message drops into your in-box. It’s not good enough to turn off the sound. Believe me, I’ve tried; instead of being distracted by sound it was the delivery icon that grabbed my attention. Knowing I had new mail, I just had to find out what it was.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that I had to shut email down while working. I’ve been doing so for months now. It was hard to get used to at first. It’s fun to get email; you never know what good thing might be in the box waiting to be discovered. But after a while I realized what a boon it is to concentrate without those chimes going off every 10 minutes. These days I check email every hour or two, and that works just fine.

Managing The In-Box

But no matter how you handle the delivery aspect of email, in the end you’ve still got to deal with in-box contents.

These days most email clients (and here I intend that phrase to include webmail) come with some sort of automatic or at least semi-automatic management software involving folders (Gmail uses labels rather than folders, but allows you to create a folder system of your design).  If you don’t like the management system of your client, look for add-ons like these two for Outlook:

• MoveIT eliminates the need to file emails manually. According to the company, some users report freeing up to one day of work per month. When setting up rules in MoveIT, you can start using projects effectively. MoveIT lets you specify that all email from, say, John Smith should be filed in the JSmith folder; you can then create a new rule and specify that, if an email is from John Smith AND the subject contains the term “acme production,” the email should be filed in a different folder (e.g., “Acme”). MoveIT offers a fuly-functional 45-day evaluation download.

• Speedfiler, also for Outlook, helps you keep email organized by speeding up the process of filing incoming/outgoing messages, without requiring you to change the way you work or organize your mail. If you’ve already established a hierarchical  folder structure, you may prefer this program. You can evaluate the program for free for 30 days.

The Four “D’s”

In addition, you might want to try the using the “Four D’s.” Taken together, the Four D’s  constitute an invaluable method for processing your e-mail in-box—take them seriously, and you’ll only need to look at most emails once. The Four D choices are:

1. Delete It: Go through your in-box quickly, deleting everything you don’t need. Some items can be deleted without reading; others can be deleted after a glance. Don’t keep messages you won’t need in the future.
2. Do It: If you can take care of the action needed for the email in under 2 minutes, do so. Don’t put it off for some later time. Do it now, then it’s done, and the email won’t haunt you while cluttering up your in-box. Many email responses can be handled in well under 2 minutes.
3. Delegate It: If the email is better handled by someone else, send it off to that person with a message. Then delete the original email from your in-box. If you need to refer to it in the future, you’ve got the “Sent” copy.
4. Defer It: A certain percentage of your email messages will need to be deferred to a future time. One way to make sure they get done: turn them into tasks by entering them into a notebook or task software such as TaskWise. Once you do that, shift the email from your in-box into the task folder you’ve established in your email client; keep it for reference and delete it after the task is completed.

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Of Related Interest:

In June I wrote a post about the burgeoning problem of “Information Overload,” citing the findings of knowledge economy research and advisory firm Basex.

If you’re interested in this topic, you may want to attend the Basex web-based meeting on August 12. The Information Overload Awareness Day Inaugural Event—“a day of high-level interaction, knowledge sharing, and learning about the problem of Information Overload, all without leaving your office”—begins at 11 a.m. EDT / 3 p.m. GMT / 8 a.m. PDT. More details here.

© Suzanne Rodriguez

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