Treatment for eMail Overload

By Craig Davis,SLPowers

Corporate workers are now spending as much as 40% of their time dealing with email. I personally have come to expect between 100 and 150 emails every business day. From the important, such as a new customer requesting information to the mundane, such as an endless chain of email discussions between colleagues. It’s come to the point where the issue can no longer be ignored. I’ve assembled a list of tips that you can use to help keep the problem at bay, at least until software catches up and solves the issue for us.

1. Get a search tool on your PC or notebook, RIGHT NOW.The three leaders are Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search, or my personal favorite, X1 by Yahoo. These tools index all of the emails, files, pictures, documents, etc. on your hard drive in advance. When you search for them, the files that match whatever you search for get called up instantly and update as fast as you can type or delete another letter.

2. Eliminate SPAM from making it to your inbox. As obvious as it sounds, for many people SPAM was once a small problem and because it has very gradually gotten worse, they’ve done nothing about it. There are many solutions out there, and though we at SLPowers recommend our managed SPAM solution (called SPAZ), even Outlook, especially since Outlook 7 was released, can do the job. Simply setting Outlook to its most aggressive setting gets most of the work done for you. Remember that it is always be wise to periodically scan your SPAM and junk folders for false positives.

3. Create rules in outlook to direct all “automated” emails to their own folder. For example if you subscribe to routine news lists, you can direct them to a new folder called “News Lists.” Many users also create rules that direct any emails that do not contain their email address in the “TO:” line out of their inbox and into a lower priority folder which can be reviewed on weekly basis or even less.

4. Keep your inbox clean. I use my inbox, literally as my workflow inbox. If I need to work on something, it stays there. Otherwise it gets saved in another folder or deleted. This simple tip saves me from having to go through many emails to find something as recent as this morning.

5. Rename your email subjects so that you can recall emails later much more quickly. For example if I’m about to send a reply with the subject “RE: Info we spoke about” I’ll change it to “RE: Sanchez Account – Spam proposal” instead. This has saved countless hours searching for things later. In fact, sometimes if no reply is called for, I’ll forward the email to myself with a more relevant subject and then I’ll drag that email to a folder that gets saved.