4 Steps to Reclaiming Control of Your Email

Just last week I was spending close to an hour a day sorting through e-mails. This week, after cleaning it up, it’s 10-15 minutes a day! Here’s what really helped me:

Forward 

I have to keep track of 6 e-mail accounts – Outlook, 3 Gmails, 1 Hotmail, and 1 at my website. Sure, I had some forwarding set up before, but now I finally set up forwarding of ALL my mail to one Gmail account. So instead of checking each individual mailbox every day, I login and check all of them at once.

Unsubscribe

I’m not talking about junk mail or spam here. I’m talking about newsletters, ezines, updates, coupons, membership updates and such that you chose to sign up for a while ago, but no longer need. As I went through each and every e-mail in each Inbox, I immediately unsubscribed from the ones I was no longer interested in, had no use of, or had no time for. It really cut down on the amount of clutter that I receive.

Delete

This is a difficult part, but there is really no way around it. And no, you can’t simply move the e-mails to a bunch of folders since well, it wouldn’t achieve the ultimate goal of an easy-to-navigate, time-saving e-mail. Instead, go through each e-mail in your Inbox and folders one last time and dispose of it accordingly.

While I deleted all the e-mails, I made sure to save whatever content was important by bookmarking websites, susbscribing to blogs via RSS instead of e-mails, downloading and saving any e-books and white papers that I thought useful. And of course, adding senders’ contact information to my address book. This was, by far, the most time-consuming part.

Tag (and file)

Yes, I said that you shouldn’t be filing any e-mails “for later”. But for this to become a rule, it should have a few exceptions. My exceptions are the two labels (Gmail) – Action Required and Waiting on Reply.  If an incoming e-mail calls for a short and quick reply, I do it right away. Then I label it Waiting on Reply if a reply is expected or required for me to proceed further.

Then there are e-mails that I can’t reply to right away because they require additional research or an action on my part. I label them Action Required, move out of Inbox and go through them later. That’s where I put e-mails with links to white papers, screencasts, etc.

For this system to work, I had to establish a few rules:

• Keep my replies short and to the point
• Use templates and autoresponders whenever appropriate
• Act on an e-mail if it takes less than 2 minutes, otherwise label Action Required (if worth acting on)
• Go through Action Required label once a week, act, then – delete (or move to Waiting on Reply).

Sure, this system required initial investment of time to get through all the e-mails. I had to spend several days, a couple of hours each day, to get through the backlog. But once that was done, following the rules was really easy. Now I check my e-mail twice a day, spending about 5-10 minutes in it each time. Amazingly, not that many e-mails end up as Action Required either.

Technorati Tags: time management, GTD

Related posts:

1. Are You Spending Too Much Time Replying to E-mails?
2. Best for Last – September 25, 2009