Any busy person understands the overwhelming sight of countless emails sitting in an inbox on a Monday morning. They come in all shapes and sizes: there are those that don't require a response, easy enough, on to the next; the sales ones asking us to check out a new glass product, annoying; there are the more stressful, maybe a note from a client, or even worse, a contractor with 25 RFIs. 

The list goes on, but the common denominator remains the demand of our time and mental bandwidth, which can become cumbersome throughout our complex workdays. How can we manage this digital phenomenon? The skilled reader will have a well-oiled process, share your insights in the comments. 

For everyone else, here are some tips:

Filter

In 10 Steps to Become an Email Ninja, Tim Ferriss advocates a focus on the essential and an elimination of the inessential, things like spam. He achieves this by using Gmail, which he believes has the best spam filter. Additionally, he limits email notifications from online services such as Amazon and Paypal by creating filters "that will automatically put [them] into a folder and mark them as read, or trash them." 

Batch

We often receive emails that require quick responses, maybe around 20 seconds each. Instead of reacting to these as they arrive in our inbox, Tim advocates creating a batch folder. "As I know these emails pretty well, I created filters that send them into a “batch” folder to be processed once a day. [It] takes a couple minutes to process the whole folder, and I don’t have to see them in my inbox.," he writes.

Unsubscribe

Online entities are good at grabbing our email addresses and we willingly release it to them, knowing the consequences to follow. After we've accessed the information to which our email was the key, we then receive an onslaught of unwanted messages, and instead of unsubscribing we repeatedly delete them, week after week. Let's just scroll down, click unsubscribe, and be free of the cacophony.

Labels, folders, and categories

Any seasoned project manager will have an inbox meticulously ordered with folders and categories for the projects, teams, and engagements filtered through it. Inbox categorization is a highly personalized process and each person will have their own preferences (or your firm may have a standard to follow), such as creating a separate folder for each project and then subdividing that folder based on discipline and so on and so forth. Having order eliminates the chaos bound to ensue from everything landing in one place.

Disable Notifications

A simple enough strategy, and a bit connected to the batching idea, sometimes closing our email application on our desktop can help limit its constant disruption. Depending on your role and work culture, this could work wonders or cause friction. There are those environments where a superior might expect an immediate response to their internal email and others where delayed response is okay.

Ultimately, there are endless ways to structure one's communicative endeavors, these tips only scratch the surface. Personally, I like to keep it as simple as possible. How do you manage your email?

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