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Control your email while you’re on holiday
August 27, 2014
What on earth should you do with your email when you’re away on holiday? Switch off and face returning to a bulging inbox? Stay connected and risk not having a proper break? Delegate access to a colleague?
Each option has pros and cons. But there’s a constant factor: taking a holiday gives you a unique opportunity to clean out your inbox. Done properly, this will substantially reduce your holiday backlog.
You should aim to leave an empty inbox and inoculate yourself from a severe attack of information overload on your return. Here’s what to do:
1. Use the week before
During the week leading up to your holiday, set time aside each day to spend clearing out your inbox.
Be absolutely ruthless. For example, delete multiple copies of the same email, retaining only the last message in the chain. Move emails that are no longer current into a folder. Flag emails that will need attention when you return.
2. Prioritise emails for when you return
Put newsletters, social media updates and so on in to a folder where they won’t be in the way when you return.
Remove yourself from all unnecessary email circulation lists, and flag up messages you need to deal with once you’re back.
3. Use rules and filters intelligently
Use automatic filters to de-prioritise unimportant emails and file messages automatically while you’re away.
For example, you can set up Outlook (or your preferred email client) to move all emails from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn into a specific folder. Or you can even delete them altogether.
4. Brief your colleagues
If you’ve decided to give a colleague access to your inbox while you’re away, take the time to give them a rundown of what is and isn’t important.
They need to know which messages to prioritise in your absence, and who they should reply to quickly.
5. Set a professional out of office message
Think about what to say in your out of office message. Do your customers really want to know that you’ve ‘jetted off for a week of sun and sangria’?
Make sure your out of office message doesn’t give away any sensitive information, either.
If you do decide to stay connected, stay disciplined and check your email only once or twice a day. And remember: all the evidence suggests that disconnecting is good for our health and wellbeing.
- Email overload is damaging productivity
- When it comes to email replies, is faster always better?
- How to sort out your email once and for all
Copyright © 2014 Monica Seeley, founder of Mesmo and a leading expert on email best practice.
Now is the time to clean up your inbox
January 23, 2012
According to research, 2.8 million emails per second were sent in 2010. Given that incredible figure (I wonder who counted them all), it’s no surprise that email overload is an ever-growing problem.
You probably know the feeling. You start work in the morning by opening your email. It takes an hour – or more – to deal with all the queries in your inbox. And then you seem to spend most of the rest of the day replying to replies to the email you sent first thing. Confusing, isn’t it?
Your inbox is a source of stress
My own data indicates that almost half of us in the UK receive 50 – 70 emails a day. Some people receive 180 or even more! For all the noise about social media becoming the communications channel of choice, the numbers show that business email isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Yet most of us need less than half of the email we receive. Just think of all the pointless one-line replies, the emails you were copied in on out of politeness and, of course, the newsletters, the special offers, the junk, the spam you have no intention of reading but which still takes time and effort to sort through and delete.
Email overload takes up people’s time and causes stress. But there’s another reason businesses need to address this problem: money.
The bottom line to email overload
On average, we each lose an hour a day because of ineffective email use. At an hourly cost of £20, that’s about £4,200 of lost productivity for every single person a year. Does your business really need that in the current economic climate?
Many companies are waking up to this. Volkswagen has taken an extreme route, deciding that the best way to give its people some respite is to block out-of-hours email altogether. Fine, but doesn’t that just move the problem to the next morning rather than solving it completely?
You can do a lot with better planning. Cut down on the number of unnecessary emails you send and be realistic about replying. Take a stand against the culture of replying instantly to everything and instead develop a system to help you identify which emails are important, which can wait, and which should go straight in the bin.
Clean out your inbox next week
Together, we can put an end to email overload. And the work starts right there, in the folder marked ‘inbox’. If you’re willing to give it a go, I can help: my company, Mesmo, is running Clean Out Your Inbox Week – and it starts today!
Together with fellow email expert Marsha Egan I’ll be offering hints, tips and online tools to help you get on top of your email. We’ll explain how to get rid of email noise, what to do to prioritise emails and why email etiquette matters.
It’s completely free and you might even get the chance to win a prize! To get more information and take part, head over to my blog.
Monica Seeley is an email and productivity expert who runs Mesmo. Learn more about email overload and email etiquette on her website.
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