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Five Smart Ways To Cope With Your Inbox

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Most of us have experienced the feeling of being overwhelmed by our inbox.

Sometimes it feels like work email is infringing on every corner of our lives.

In a survey of 1,000 workers in the US, conducted by Good Technology, research found that 68% of people checked their work email before 8am, 50% checked email while still in bed, and 40% dealt with work emails after 10pm.

Another recent report by Ofcom, in the UK, found that nearly half of all workers (46%) use work email outside of office hours.

Workers in senior management are even more likely to send work-related emails outside office hours. Almost three quarters (72%) did so occasionally and 44% did so regularly.

So how can you cope with your inbox? Is it possible to keep a lid on it? And how should you deal with incessant email demands?

Here are five smart ways to cope with your inbox:

Don’t answer when you’re overwhelmed

Just at the point when you’re overwhelmed with information overload, the chances are, one more demand will come in by email. Beware of replying too quickly at this point. Perhaps someone is trying to push you into something, or fill up your diary beyond a manageable load. Whatever the request, if you’re feeling overwhelmed and overloaded, delay your response. In this state, if you reply immediately, you risk making a bad decision, as your judgement will tend to be poor. Once you take a step back, you’ll regain perspective, and give yourself time to think. Your response is also likely to be more considered, clearer and stronger. Simple, effective ways to delay responding include saying: “I’ve seen your message. Thanks, I’ll get back to you.” Or saying, for example, “I’ll get back to you tomorrow with an answer”.

Delete and unsubscribe

Make good use of the delete key. You don’t have to read everything. You should also regularly unsubscribe to any lists that you no longer need, or that you never signed up for in the first place. One of the most overwhelming times to face your inbox is when you’ve just got back from holiday. There’s a mountain of messages to wade through … But this is the best time to unsubscribe from unnecessary messages. At this point, you can see clearly what you no longer need. Yes, it takes an extra couple of seconds to open a message and unsubscribe, rather than just deleting the message, but do that regularly, and your inbox should start to become clearer.

Remember it wasn’t always so

What did we do before email? Business was conducted, appointments were arranged, and the world, somehow, turned. We tend to forget this. Put email in perspective, and get up from your desk and go and talk to someone instead. Sometimes it’s a welcome change to phone someone, or go and speak to someone in person, and in fact, it can resolve an issue more fully and efficiently.

Don’t let everything live in your inbox

Use folders to siphon off emails into organised ‘boxes’ that you can refer back to and easily find. A lot of the time we waste on email is due to searching for a message we know is there … somewhere. Well-organised folders help us to deal with this issue. They also mean that you don’t scan through everything each time you log in to your inbox (with different subject lines pulling at your attention and reminding you of other things).

Change your folders every six months

Projects move on, and priorities change. Every six months or so, check on the folders you have set up. Do you still need an email folder for that project? Or is it now out of date? Old projects can be moved to an archive folder. If we don’t change our folders, then we tend to try and make pieces of work fit our filing system, rather than the filing system fitting the work (this also applies to general document filing). This makes things harder to find, and store. A sign that you need to do this is if you are repeatedly finding that the folder you need doesn’t exist. If that’s the case, create it!

Frances Booth is author of The Distraction Trap: How to Focus in a Digital World. To get your free first chapter of The Distraction Trap, and for more productivity tips, join her mailing list here