Is your inbox full of email you might need but haven’t had time to think about or file away? Is it all jumbled up with mail you definitely don’t need, but you don’t have the time or energy to sift the wheat from the chaff?

Just sweep it all in to an archive file labeled “2009” and forget about it.  If you need to go back and look for something later then Outlook’s search function can do a good enough job to find it for you.

Right now is the perfect time to do this : a few weeks in to a new year.  Anything from last year can’t really be “pending”, so you can just lump it all together.  Your inbox will be slim and trim, searching will run quicker on the most recent items and your backups will run much quicker.

The key word is “archive”.  Don’t just create a folder in the inbox, as that won’t really free up any space.  On the  Outlook File menu, select “Archive”.  Choose the “before” date as Dec 31 2009.  Browse to the location you want to keep the archive file and create a new one called “2009”, or something meaningful to you.  The process may take a while to run, so find a time when you won’t be needing the computer to do this!

Repeat for the sent items!

Do remember to keep a backup copy of the “pst” file you created, perhaps on a USB disk or burnt to a DVD.  There shouldn’t be any need to change any email from 2009 now, so a single copy safely stored elsewhere should be good enough.

Richard Carrey, Technology Support Ltd

Technology Support Ltd provides computer support for small businesses.  They can advise on the best ways to adminster your email and backup systems.  Check out www.tecsupp.com

I know you don’t have a lot of time, so here’s a quick and dirty (but solid) process to help you tackle the clutter in your life, whether it’s electronic, physical or mental.

The Quick and Dirty Organising Process:

1. Get real
2. Get some breathing space
3. Get past the guilt
4. Get new systems
5. Get a new mindset
6. Get support

This month we’ll look at how to apply the Quick and Dirty Organising Process to email. In future articles, we’ll look at paper, time, goals and clutter at home. If you would like to see examples for something else, just let me know.

Quick and Dirty Email Organising

If I only have an hour to help someone with email overload, this is what we do. I usually have to get a little bossy. It’s not pretty, but it works every time. Ready for me to slap you around a bit?

Step 1: Get Real

Admit that you’re not going to go through all those emails in your Inbox anytime soon. This is boring, time-consuming and probably unnecessary in most cases. So let’s get that email clutter out of your way.

Next, recognise that most of the time you spend filing emails is wasted time. How many do you really reach for again? When you do look for one, how successful is your search? Exactly. Let’s stop all that silly micro-filing.

Step 2: Get some breathing space

Move all your emails from the Inbox to a folder called Inbox 2009. Going forward, unsubscribe or set Junk Mail rules for stuff you don’t want to see again.

Take all your email folders and put them into a folder called Folders 2009. You’re going to set up something new – keep reading.

Get past the guilt

Call this a fresh start, and ignore that Inbox 2009 folder.

If this is hard for you, block 30 minutes each week to systematically process all those old emails according to your new systems. If you miss doing this some weeks – don’t fret. Hopefully you’ll discover that the world doesn’t turn on your old emails. Look forward – not back.

Get new systems

1. Create some email action folders that will help you clear your Inbox quickly each day. The idea is to batch emails according to your next action. Examples:

• Reply Today (This tends to roll to the next day, and that’s OK.)
• Review on Weekend (This is for stuff you don’t need to think about until you’re planning for next week.)
• Discuss (with boss/team/spouse at regular meetings)
• Admin (All those fiddly tasks you hate to do. Blast through them once weekly – with good coffee or wine at hand!)
• Personal (Put photos in here too – to organise later.)
• Reading (Great for regular newsletters, etc.)
• Watching/Waiting (For things you’ve delegated)
• Idea Capture (A personal favourite – for great ideas you want to process into your idea/project lists later, say once a month)
• Done (For emails you’ve dealt with, don’t need to micro-file, but want to keep. They don’t live in the Inbox anymore. Going forward, most of your old emails can be deleted or stored here and retrieved using your search function.)
• Current Projects (This will probably have subfolders – but keep it simple.)

2. Wherever possible, set rules to get emails into these folders for you automatically.

3. If you find yourself reaching for some of your old folders, look for how to incorporate these into your new action-focused system.

4. Establish a regular time each day or week to deal with what’s in your action folders. Tie this to a reliable routine you already have, or set a reminder on your desktop calendar or phone until this becomes a habit.

5. If you do a lot of emailing on your handheld, make sure you have folder sync set up so you can clear your Inbox properly anytime, anywhere. This is a great way to use the time while you’re commuting, waiting for a meeting to start or sitting in the car waiting to pick up the kids.

6. Set a target for keeping your inbox count low, and don’t call it a day before getting down to this number. This is a bit like creating a ‘clean desk’ policy for yourself. Examples:

• Inbox Zero (nice, but not essential)
• No more than what I can see without scrolling
• A round number, e.g. 10 or 30
• Your age

Get a new mindset

Treat clearing your Inbox like a game. Set a timer and see how long it takes you to hit your Inbox count target. I guarantee it takes less time that you think it does. This is always a hugely empowering realisation for our clients who are overwhelmed by email. Go ahead – time it, and watch yourself get faster.

Ignore that voice in your head that says clearing the Inbox is not really working. Without processing your Inbox systematically, you are regularly robbing yourself of time to focus on the real priorities. Not convinced? Read this article.

Get support

A lot of your email woes are related to the habits that have evolved between you and the people you live/work with. You can make everyone’s life easier by establishing some shared best practices about how and when you use email. Suggest you have a coffee or a call together to brainstorm ways to be smarter about email together.

This does not have to take a long time or be very formal. Just make the appointment and start the conversation.

Thanks muchly to the editor for inviting me to contribute to the column!

These articles focus on some popular Team Productivity issues.

Enjoy!

• Mapping Stimulates Creative Processes
• Efficiency is Now Top Priority for Firms
• Don’t Allow Email to Take Over Your Life

Question: What’s the first thing they do?

Answer: They apply a process called triage.

Definition: Triage is the sorting of, and allocation of, treatment to patients, especially battle and disaster victims, according to a proven system of priorities designed to maximise the number of survivors.

Application: What’s this got to do with email? It’s a near-perfect metaphor, actually. Read on to see how a triage approach to managing your inbox will add hours to your week and minimise email stress.

The word triage comes from the French verb trier, meaning to separate, sort, sift or select. The triage process used by emergency room staffers is designed to simplify decision making. A colour-coded tag is used to identify the next actions to be taken as follows:

Black:  Deceased/Expectant

Patients are so severely injured that they will die of their injuries, possibly in hours or days; they should be taken to a holding area and given painkillers as required to reduce suffering.

Red:  Immediate/Life Threatening

Patients require immediate surgery or other life-saving intervention, and have first priority for surgical teams or transport to advanced facilities; they “cannot wait” but are likely to survive with immediate treatment.

Yellow:  Delayed/ Observation

Patients’ condition is stable for the moment but requires watching by trained persons and frequent re-triage, will need hospital care (and would receive immediate priority care under “normal” circumstances).

Green:  Minor/Wait

Patients will require a doctor’s care in several hours or days but not immediately, may wait for a number of hours or be told to go home and come back the next day.

White:  Dismiss/Walking Wounded

Patients have minor injuries; first aid and home care are sufficient, a doctor’s care is not required.

————————————-

Now, once our triage team has finished with the sorting, what do they do next? They turn their attention toward treating the highest priority cases.  They can do this with greater peace of mind and focus because they know every case has been reviewed and prioritised. To avoid random and reactive treatment – and potentially losing sight of true priorities – they’ve first concentrated on completing an efficient and focused sorting process before getting down to work.

EMAIL TRIAGE

So, to make this work for your email a couple of things are needed:

1. An understanding of the difference between sorting email and working on the stuff that’s in the email. Anything in between is highly inefficient, even if you like to call it ‘multi-tasking.’
2. A commitment to sort (a.k.a. ‘process’) your entire inbox down to empty on a regular basis. The goal of this exercise is to make a decision about every email and ‘tag it’ – literally if that’s your thing, or or file it for follow-up, or make a task out of it, or grab what’s useful from it, or get rid of it. This is a different activity from actually doing all the work required by some of the emails. You’ll do that next – or later – or never…per your decision.

(Skeptics, take note – this ‘extra step’ of processing will actually save you time, contrary to your fears. See here and here and here for more on this.)

To triage your email well, your brain may also need to get better at:

• being selective about deserves your time and attention
• being decisive about how and when you will follow through on things (or not)

Imagine, then, a triage system for your emails:

• Black: Dead or Done - Junk or stuff I’m finished with (delete or file as Done)
• Red: Do Immediately - Do or Die – as soon as I’m finished with the triage
• Yellow: Do Soon - Take care of this Today or This Week (file for follow-up or schedule a task accordingly)
• Green:  Can Wait - Throw into Next Week or Later (file for review on Friday/Monday or monthly)
• White: Info Only - Grab what I need from this (idea, information, link, phone number, etc.) – and then the email will be Black

Cautionary note to organising junkies:

Am I suggesting you create an elaborate colour-coding scheme for your emails? Please…no! It’s a metaphor.

Ready to move beyond the figurative?

Read this for how to set up some follow-up email files that work for lots of folks. Or take our course to learn how to do all this really well in Outlook, using your Calendar and Tasks better. Non-Outlook users, try Remember the Milk. When you’re ready to get good and truly sorted, check out this course to learn how to triage everything – not just email – using our FAST Formula.

One more thing – pop over to our Productivity Poll and tell us how many emails are in your inbox right now. The fun bit? You can see what everybody else said. It will either make you feel great or give you a good giggle. Both are nice.

We call this behaviour Inbox Surfing: skimming emails at the top of the Inbox repeatedly to decide what to work on next.

Inbox Surfers typically dip into the inbox to pull something off the top that seems fun, fast or has is suddenly become important. While they’re working on the latest arrival, more emails land in the inbox and important messages sink to the bottom of the bunch.

This keeps happening every day, and we tell ourselves that one weekend we’ll come into the office to sort through it ALL once and for all… but for most people, Later Never Comes. In the meantime, important tasks slip through the cracks, and we develop a scattered, inefficient approach to our daily work.

Intuitively many of us know that we could handle this better, but we wonder, “Does it really matter?” Well, only if you value your time and your sanity! Let’s look at what this way of working is costing you, some better approaches you can implement today, and the payoff you’ll enjoy when you make the change.

The Cost of Inbox Surfing

Inbox surfing costs you precious time and risks you dropping balls – for others and for yourself.

In a 2007 study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, such as writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming email. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse web sites.

Don’t underestimate the power of creating email-free zones in your day. Consider this:

A 2004 study conducted by the University of London reported that both interruptions and the consequent task-switching caused by email take a heavy toll on workers, who tend to spend an average of only three minutes working on any one activity before switching to the others. The cost of this multi-tasking, trying to juggle new messages with existing work is, over a day, equivalent to the loss of a night’s sleep.

So our productivity and our mental capacity are impaired by this behaviour. I don’t know about you, but I want to have as much brain power as I can!

Simple Changes You Can Make Today

1. Each time you open your email, set a goal to remove as many messages from the inbox as possible. This doesn’t mean you’re going to do all the work first; it means you’ll shift your mindset from ‘doing email’ to ‘sorting email.’

2. Set up 5 folders in your email system:

• Do Today
• Do This Week
• Review on Friday
• Watching and Waiting
• Done

3. When you need to take action on an email, ask yourself 2 questions:

• What is the next action I need to take on this?
• When will I take that action?

4. If you want to do the task Today or This Week, move the email to the right folder. If the task can wait until next week or later, move it to the Review on Friday folder.

5. If you need to hold something because the next action is someone else’s, move the email to the Watching and Waiting folder.

6. If you don’t need to take action but want to keep the email, file it as you normally would or move it to the Done folder.

7. After you’ve sorted your email in this way, shift your attention to the To Do Today folder and starting working your way through it according to your priorities.

8. Finish each day with a review of what’s left in Do Today and Do This Week, and rearrange in preparation for the next day.

9. Find some time each Friday to look at the Review on Friday folder and plan time to work on those tasks the next week. Schedule time in your calendar for these actions. Also look at the Watching and Waiting folder to see if you need to nudge anyone to move things forward.

10. Repeat the steps above as frequently as you can, and watch the emails in your inbox disappear!

You can get a lot fancier than this if you want to power up your method of managing Tasks, but in the absence of anything else, why not give the approach above a try?

The Payoff for Working Differently

How will this help you? Let me count the ways…

1. You’ll have a clear picture of what you need to do on any given day.
2. You’ll have peace of mind that you have not let any important work get buried in the inbox.
3. You’ll visit the inbox less frequently, and with a greater sense of purpose.
4. You’ll think about each message really well the first time you receive it – instead of re-re-re-rereading messages every time you skim subject lines.
5. You’ll become more decisive and action-focused.
6. You’ll be carving out time for tasks that require deep, longer stretches of concentration.
7. You’ll achieve more of your goals and cross more things off your list!
8. You’ll stop interrupting your workflow to check email all day every day.
9. You’ll increase your ability to focus.
10. You’ll gain a sense of control in today’s chaotic workplace.

Ah…sounds good, doesn’t it? It’s yours for the taking.

Do you know that moment when you’re just about to look at your email for the first time in the morning? While your computer fires up or your PDA pulls up the messages, what goes through your head?

But what about those other messages? After you’ve attended to the critical stuff, do you have a routine for deleting the junk, then filing (or ignoring) lower priority messages? It’s good to get all this riff-raff out of your Inbox, but wouldn’t it be nice if most of it never hit your Inbox in the first place?

If you added up all the seconds you’re spending reading subject lines – only to discover the message isn’t important right now – you’d discover a nice chunk of time you could be using each day for higher value activities. Here are a few tricks to help you trade up your subject-line-scanning time:

Folder Rules and Smart Mailboxes

Use Folder Rules in the Outlook Options menu, Smart Mailboxes for Mac or gmail tags to automatically divert lower priority messages or those you want to batch for consolidated review later.

Examples:

• Friend requests for social networking sites
• Useful newsletters you’d like to read sometime
• Catalogue order confirmations
• Monthly billing notifications

RSS
Feeds

Check whether some of your favourite online content sites like blogs and newsletters offer an RSS Feed option. Set up a feed reader such as Feed Demon, subscribe to the Feeds you like, and unsubscribe from the email lists.

Create Separate Personal and Work Addresses

Set yourself up to receive and send multiple email addresses in/out of the same application (e.g. your gmail addresses are run through Outlook or Entourage), then create Rules that collect all mail sent to your personal address in one folder, work emails to another, etc. This is like creating separate Inboxes, which allows you to concentrate on different roles at different times of the day.

Use a Good Spam Filter

Talk with your tech department to get a spam filter up and running. If you have one but are still receiving a good deal of junk, fiddle with the sensitivity levels until you are happy with the filtering. If you don’t have a tech department, contact us for recommendations and help with this.

Discover the Junk
Mail Rule

When you wind up on somebody’s mailing list but don’t want to receive their news, you can block further communication by marking it as Junk Mail. This is especially useful when dealing with possible phishing messages which use the ‘click here to unsubscribe’ link as a sneaky way to confirm that your email address is a real one.

Wait and See…

The less email you send, the less you will receive. For more on this, see The Hamster Revolution. Allow some ‘urgent’ emails, Reply-to-All conversations and messages representing incomplete thinking some time to simmer before contributing. Per Cicero: “Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.”

Team Communications
Charter

In corporate settings a good 60% of the email someone receives come from the same 8 senders. If this is true for your workgroup, it’s worth taking some time to get everybody on the same page as to how, when and why email is to be used. For a proven training solution, read about the Info-Excellence Seminar.

Need help with some of the tech set-up? Please get in touch with us.