Email rules my day far less than it used to.
Here are some tweaks I made to make it so.
1. I turned off desktop alerts – no more audio or popup messages when I get a new email. (Only took me 30 years of using work email…)
2. I close Outlook when I am not actively using it.
3. Filters, filters, filters and folders, folders, folders. Only about half of my email goes into my inbox. The rest is filtered automatically into one of 30 or so folders sitting under the inbox. I have:
- A filter for mail from each co-worker, with a separate folder for each person
- A filter for new mail coming from each Blackboard unit that I teach, each in a new folder for each unit
- Filters for alerts from journal databases, library catalogues, listservs and other informational resources – each one with its own folder
- Filters for important work distribution lists that would otherwise go straight to my inbox – each one with their own folder
- Filters for emails I sent from my other email addresses to myself
4. Prioritising when I check filtered folders.
- I monitor email from students from my Blackboard units every time I have my email open
- I prioritise emails from co-workers
- Journal alerts I would look at maybe once a week during quiet periods, when I deal with my reading backlog…
5. Each day I set aside two blocks in my calendar of one hour to deal with email. These are appointments marked “busy”.
6. I set aside one three hour block in my calendar at the end of the week to deal with any backlog. Most weeks I get to inbox zero and make sure I have either completed, or know when I will complete, each task associated with each email from that week.
7. When checking the filtered folders or inbox, emails are either:
- If they can be done in under 2 minutes, dealt with then
- If they are urgent, categorised with a red “Pending my action” flag
- If neither, manually moved to one of my “to do” folders. (see left hand side of image above)
Once I have done the “first pass” of my email, I go back and deal with the red flags, and then get to work on the “to do” folders.
8. Some tasks need more than just a reply email. I have other regular blocks of time set aside in my calendar (e.g. for teaching or for course admin). I add the task to the calendar description for the next block of time I work on that area.
9. I never delete emails once I am done with them. Either they remain in their original filtered file (so all email from co-worker x is together) or email from my inbox or a to do folder is manually dragged into just one of five folders:
- Done2019Teaching
- Done2019CourseCoordination
- Done2019StudyPlans
- Done2019Research
- Done2019Admin
10. If I want to locate previous conversations, I just use the search function.
I originally had a lot of categories in my Done list. Then for the last five years I had a “Done2019Month” folder for each month. This year I just started using these five, and will continue for the year.
11. At the end of the year, the whole lot of folders are transferred to a single folder called “[year]Archive”, keeping the same file structure. Then I set up a whole lot of new, empty folders ready to receive filtered messages and the cycle starts again for the new year.