Email Overload?

What a great innovation email is. Instant communications, virtual conversations, document collaboration, and more. It’s all wonderful until there is too much of a good thing – which we painfully obvious on return from vacation or even some days off.

Just look at where we spend our time in the average day – a huge piece of it is spent reading and replying to emails. Unlike the rest of our day, email doesn’t care if I’m in the office or not – the virtual conversations and meetings steam forward.

The trick is to stay on top of it all.

Junk mails are the easy one – delete, delete, delete… At least most of them get caught by the spam filter, so at least I am done with refinancing my house, buying prescription meds, and changing the size of my body parts…

The rest of the mail needs at least a quick look to keep up with what’s happening, to stay involved in the conversations and decision-making, and to take action where needed.

Most of us try to handle new emails as they come in. That’s good. It’s a way of staying on top of our jobs. Personally, I try to keep my Inbox of items still to be handled down below 100 or so. If it gets much bigger than that and I start to feel behind.

There’s a danger of keeping up with all the email traffic, though. If I let it become my primary focus, then I find myself following various trails and paths which may or may not help me achieve my overall objectives.

So it’s a question of balance – keeping focused on what I really want to achieve versus handling issues of the minute.

I guess how we handle email traffic is a lot like how managers of the past handled their office door – except that they often had an assistant to give out the excuses…

As for my Inbox?? I shouldn’t feel too bad – I’m only 71% over my target of 100 items, and I’ve only been back from vacation since Monday…

Feel like you have something to contribute??   Send me an email!