By Michelle LaBrosse
Our love affair with email, like many love affairs, started out perfectly. It was the perfect tool -- fast, easy to use. It allowed us to multitask, to contact scores of people at once, and to stay on top of events and news in our industries and in our lives.
Now, for many people, the honeymoon is long over, but it doesn't have to be. Email can still be a useful tool. The secret is learning how to manage the email and not let it manage you.
Here's how:
Don't check it first thing in the morning
I know it's hard. I know there's a little letter icon in your inbox that could change your entire future. Or it's that new business lead you've been cultivating for a year, with a big, juicy project for you.
Resist.
Few emails are so mission-critical they demand an immediate response. Chances are that much of it is for reference purposes, touching base, personal, or pure junk.
Once I stopped checking email first thing, I insteaad tackled the first item on my to-do list and became a lot more productive. Previously, I spent the first part of my day not on critical tasks, but on responding to whatever was in my inbox (some of which was personal, others which were not urgent) and I spent too much time crafting long, thoughtful answers when a briefer one would have done the trick.
More than that, I found that doing email first thing put me in a reactive mindset, not a proactive one. I also found it helpful not to be alerted when a new email came in; freeing me to focus on the task at hand without being interrupted with an email that I had won the Irish Lottery and they'd transfer the funds the minute I sent them my bank routing information and account number.
Are you regularly getting messages on the same topic?
If you get multiple emails from different people about the same topic -- a particular aspect of your company's return policy, for instance, that might be a clue that people interacting with your company can't easily find that information online.
If you don't have a FAQ on your Web site, you might want to create one. If you do, you might want to update it or make it more easy to find -- or both.
Banish listservs from friends
According to my inbox, I have missed out on unexpected good luck, love, or financial windfalls by deleting chain emails unopened.
That's a small price to pay to be free of chain letters, as well as inspirational poems and videos, Internet jokes, political rants, and other mass-emailed trivia from friends. If I don't get an individually-addressed message, I generally ignore it and my friends don't even notice.
Don't say Thank You
Don't say thank you in the text of an email. I often just add "THX. EOM" (end of message) in the subject line and hit Reply.
