Tips to fix your exploding inbox post holiday
Email is a wonderful invention but it’s also a curse because it’s so easy to be distracted by it.
Some of you will have asked us to keep an eye on your emails while you’re away, around 40% of you will have been unable to resist the urge to check it while you’re on holiday (guilty!!) but there are many of you who on return from your holiday will be suffering from EIS – exploding inbox syndrome!
Follow these tips and sanity should soon prevail…
Ideally set aside your first morning back to catch up on emails, post and any phone messages you’ve not listened to. This should give you enough time to get a real feel for what there is and how you should plan the rest of your week.
Deal with anything important or urgent immediately then stop to take stock…
Don’t start replying as soon as you start., therein lies distraction. Take some time to organising the emails, post and phone messages. Pick a type of correspondence and stick to that until you are finished with it. This post deals with emails but the logic can be applied to post and voicemail.
Quickly scan the contents of your emails and delete spam and anything you don’t need to read. An easy way to so this is to sort emails by subject, sender or even date.
Because you will already have different folders for your emails and if you don’t, start creating some now, move all the priority emails into a folder called, for example, “Action Today”.
While parsing if you come across anything to which you subscribe that you no longer read, create a folder called “Unsubscribe”. Don’t unsubscribe from them yet because you might start reading them and before you know it your time is up and your inbox is still full.
Filters – these are really useful aspects to most email clients from Yahoo to Outlook. If your filters haven’t already sorted your reading email, now is the time to place these in the appropriate folder(s).
Once you’ve cleared the backlog, you can start dealing with new emails which have come in and with the non priority emails you marked earlier.
Hope that helps.
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