<p>For most people these days, keeping up with the daily onslaught of email is a major challenge.&nbsp; In fact, experts estimate that e-mail has added an extra 1.23 hours to the average person&rsquo;s workday (<em>E-Writing: 21st Century Tools for Effective Communication </em>by Diana Booher; <em>Managing Your E-Mail</em> by Christina Cavanagh).&nbsp; If you multiply 1.23 hours by 5 days for 52 weeks, the average person is spending 320 hours per year of extra time handling e-mail.&nbsp; Wow! That is a lot of time spent on email. And experts estimate that the time lost to email has caused workers to shave time elsewhere, causing a productivity crunch.</p> <p>According to <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>, the average U.S. worker spends up to four hours a day sending and receiving e-mail. Of that four hours, it is estimated that one hour each day is spent on the 36 percent of e-mail messages that are either irrelevant, or relevant but do not require a response.</p> <p>So how do you survive the daily email attack? The following tips will help you manage the flow of email:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Turn off e-mail alarms and prompts through your e-mail preferences tool.</strong> Many people have alarms and prompts set to go off every few minutes upon the arrival of e-mail in their inbox.&nbsp; These continual interruptions make people respond like Pavlov&rsquo;s dogs every time they hear the &ldquo;you&rsquo;ve got mail&rdquo; chime. Turning off the chime will keep you from interrupting what you were doing to read e-mail in the midst of other projects.</li> <li><strong>Plan for the reading and response of e-mail in your daily schedule.</strong> Create a proactive method of managing e-mail by setting up time in your day dedicated to e-mail.&nbsp; Do not check e-mail the first thing in the morning, or you risk becoming reactive.&nbsp; Instead, spend the first hour working on the most important project or planning your day out.</li> <li><strong>Estimate the amount of time you are spending on e-mail now, and cut that time in half. </strong>Deadlines usually make most people more efficient.&nbsp; You may want to spend half of your allocated email time in the morning, and the other half after lunch or before you finish working for the day.&nbsp; The time constraint forces you to prioritize.&nbsp; The e-mails that do not get answered are probably not that important and, thus, deleted, or archived in file folders for future use.</li> <li><strong>Create e-mail folders, and direct the flow of e-mail.</strong> Create folders in your e-mail system that mirror your paper filing system to reinforce storage and retrieval of important information.&nbsp; In addition, create the folders to reflect your active projects and change your e-mail settings to direct e-mail that contains project-related language to those folders within your inbox. Added bonus: many e-mail systems impose limits on inbox size, but not in a folder.</li> <li><strong>Use computer storage folders. </strong>For e-mails that need to be kept for a longer period of time, create an electronic filing cabinet, with electronic folders for category names that match the physical files.&nbsp; Use Word or any system your company utilizes and backs up often.</li> <li><strong>Save the most recent only. </strong>Delete the earlier string of emails and just keep the most current one to avoid saving redundant emails.</li> <li><strong>Just save the attachment. </strong>If e-mail has an attachment and that is all you need, only save the attachment.</li> <li><strong>Control the flow of the e-mail exchange. </strong>People often feel they must respond to email instantly. Take time to consider your response and slow the flow of email when an immediate response if unnecessary.</li> <li><strong>Refrain from sending irrelevant e-mail.</strong> Be careful not to send e-mail just because it&rsquo;s quick and convenient.&nbsp; The same rules apply to e-mail as regular correspondence &ndash; if it doesn&rsquo;t have to be said, don&rsquo;t say it.</li> <li><strong>Create templates. </strong>If you frequently send the same types of emails, create templates that you can use over and over (changing only the specifics each time).</li> <li><strong>Create an e-mail ritual. </strong>Every Friday before you leave the office, be ruthless about deleting e-mails no longer needed, saving those you need for a week or longer to personal folders, saving those you need longer to Word, and reviewing those in the personal folders to delete any no longer necessary.&nbsp; Make this a weekly habit and your e-mail will be a lot more manageable. You can also do the same thing at the end of every day if you so choose.</li> </ul> <p>Many&nbsp;people are familiar with the above tips,&nbsp;but few actually implement them, leaving them to be reactive instead of proactive.&nbsp; Organizing your e-mail, like any other organizing behavior, allows you to be more productive&nbsp;and better utilize your time and energy.&nbsp; So stop the madness, and do what it takes to take control of your email. Remember, e-mail is supposed to be an electronic communications tool to assist you, not drive you crazy.</p> <p>Good luck!</p> 2009-11-11T21:02:25Z -2.79199 2597 7441 true 12 44145 how-to-survive-the-daily-e-mail-attack 36 2009-11-11T15:41:58Z 2009-11-11T22:42:10Z

For most people these days, keeping up with the daily onslaught of email is a major challenge. In fact, experts estimate that e-mail has added an extra 1.23 hours to the average person’s workday.

1 2009-11-11T22:42:10Z