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Taming the E-mail Beast
On any given day in 2010, the average corporate user sends
and receives roughly 110 messages, according to the latest e-mail
Statistics Report compiled by The Radicati Group Inc. Of that total,
74 are received messages and 36 are sent. Of those 74 messages
received, 13 were reported to be spam. The number of e-
mails will only continue to increase through 2014, hitting 119 daily
messages sent and received.
Simply trying to manage your spam messages alone is taxing
and time consuming, nonetheless messages related to business
and/or personal affairs. Strategies for dealing with too much e-
mail vary, but it boils down to organization and time management.
For myself, I usually spend time in the morning sifting
through e-mail after e-mail, while others leave it to the end of the
day. Either way, there seems to be a specific time and method
that most people use to tackle the inbox.
I have put to use my latest weapon which is the Priority Inbox
feature offered by Google. With this tool, Gmail learns to automatically
filter e-mails into three different locations that I created:
Important and unread, Important follow-up and Everything else.
"I'm training to just get through important and unread and either
respond immediately or label as follow-up, and then try to respond
to all the follow-ups by the end of the day," my coworker
said. "It has really changed the way I work throughout the day. If
anything, it saves me valuable time at the beginning and middle
of the day. I am not sorting through e-mails until the end of the
day when I am winding down." With more business being done
through e-mail and other methods of telecommunication -
whether it's internal or external communication - etiquette also is
important to many busy executives. This includes ensuring a subject
line is not cryptic and copying only those who need to be
copied on a message. Even though e-mail has made business for
people across the globe more efficient, individuals still spend too
much time staring at their computer. If it is used properly, it
makes communication much more efficient and much more
rapid. The major issue with communication oriented in e-mail or
meetings, is that people that don't use the tool the right way and
are not specific in their initiative and don't have the right directive,
in addition to people cc-ing half the world.
Protocol aside, a simple strategy for dealing with the 100 to 200
messages you may receive daily is to read it once, then get rid of
it. Many execs also noted that while spam messages are frustrating,
the so-called bacn messages - e-mail that someone signs up
for but may not want right now, such as alerts or newsletters - can
be just as annoying. The process of e-mail management has become
numbing. Your inbox doesn't have to be at zero, but it
should be manageable. With all of those messages flying back
and forth, it's easy to get lost in your in-box when trying to find
something from the past. However, for those of you who use
Gmail service from Google, there are a few little secrets that can
be extremely useful for helping you find an e-mail in a giant
haystack.
Below are some search tips for sifting through those messages
you do decide to keep that I adopted from David Pogue of the
New York Times:
Who?
The most important search term most likely has something to
do with who you sent an e-mail to, or who sent the message to
you. By typing a word that you're looking for and then amending
the search with from: or to: you can narrow your search to specific
people. For example, if you are searching for e-mails about a
wedding from Rachel you could type:
wedding from : Rachel
Where?
One of my favorite advanced search features is the ability to
snoop through different folders within your in-box. You can
search just your in-box, trash or even your spam folder, if you're
so inclined. The way you do this is to type your search term and
then add the words in: followed by the folder you hope to search.
A simple example is searching for an e-mail about Nuskin antiaging
products in your spam folder:
Nuskin in : spam
94 KOREA IT TIMES | December 2010