Nubli Blog

Before we set out to find solutions for email overload, let’s first understand the problem in its simplest and purest form. Email overload or the broader problem of Information overload has been covered widely.  Email overload occurs when the number of emails exceeds the person’s ability to respond efficiently and effectively.

a. Find the important emails

My inbox is a typical overloaded inbox. I get ~200 emails per day which has a combination, important and un-important, wanted and unwanted, legit and spam, emails. In my experience most of the inboxes follow the 80/20 rule or something close to that i.e. 20 % of the email conversation are important and need immediate attention, the rest 80% are the types of email that can wait for a response when you have time. The real challenge is – how to find those important emails.

Some people manually screen all the emails and mark the ones that are important in different colors and use color codes to assign varying degree of importance to emails.  This is a very time consuming process because I have to scan all of the emails to categorize them and at the end, I have a “Rainbow” colored inbox with a “guide book” to interpret the color codes.

Come to think of it – won’t it be better if this task can be automated, i.e. someone, possibly my virtual email assistant( I can’t afford a real one!) can screen the emails before me as they are received and sort them to different buckets; High priority – the emails that need my immediate attention go in here, Medium priority – emails that need intermittent check go in here, Low Priority – emails that need to be checked at the end of the day when I’ve some time to spare and None – a collection point for emails that are not relevant, possibly spam and are received once in a while.  I’d like this very much! The benefit of this approach is that I don’t have to wade through 200 mails to determine which one I need to respond to – I focus on responding.

b. Create your sandbox in your inbox

There are two schools of thought on what to do with emails while you are working on them. The first school of thought is to file all the emails into folders first before you act on them.  This approach has one advantage – it keeps your inbox clean. However, I’ve two issues with this approach. First this is a false sense of cleanliness. Because what we have done is just to hide the emails somewhere else. So now we need an index table to know which emails went to which folder. The second issue is that filing emails in to folders creates a “Out of sight, Out of mind” attitude. I’m more likely to forget an important email that I’ve to respond to, a task that I should complete – if they are hidden away in a folder. And that is trouble!

I belong to the second school of thought. I like it because it’s simple. I don’t have to remember what all the 50 folders are about or where did I put that email. So here’s what I do to deal with active mails.  My first principle is that my inbox is my sandbox. I play there. It stays in front of me so I ‘m constantly reminded that there are issues/tasks/actions I need to take care of. The benefit of this approach is that I’ve the visibility to what I need to do and I can plan my day/week around it. If it’s a list of things I need to do it today before I go home, I put that in one pile. It stays of my view until I’m ready to look at them. If I need to do something later in the week, then I schedule it for that day.

The only problem is that when I get 200 emails, I can’t keep all of them and follow/monitor at the same time. So I need my virtual assistant to prioritize the emails and present to me the ones that are high priority. I can act on them now or later depending on the urgency of the emails. Once I’m done I can file them – but in a different way.

c. Tag’em if you think you need them (later)

In dealing with emails, we all have developed a sense of which emails are important and we may need it later some day. So if I have a sense of needing certain emails in future, I tag them.

For example, I’ve a discussion thread going with one my company’s big customer (BigCo). I know that this is going to come up later. So the best thing for me to do is to tag it. Just to make sure that I don’t miss it in the future, I can do a three way tagging. I can tag it by the customer name, BigCo or I can tag it by the sales person who brought the deal (BigGuy) or I can either take the suggested tag and modify the title of the tag or create my own unique tag. Knowing that I deal with BigCo on a regular basis, one more option may be to tag under Bigco.BigGuy.June09 – that way all the conversation with BigCo and BigGuy are stored and remain accessible in a cohesive fashion.

Tagging can be used with online, nearline storage only.

d. Archive what you can’t delete.

How many times have you received this warning, “Inbox full – clear your inbox before sending new mails”? And this usually happens when you are about to send an important email. To create some space, I’d go on a “deleting” spree – deleting and filing attachments randomly. Deleting emails to create white space in my inbox was the only way I could get some sense of control over my inbox. It was exasperating to see the volume of emails and have no clue what to do with it. The result was that I spent a lot of time deleting emails and at times accidentally deleted important emails.

Won’t it better if I deleted the un-important emails from my inbox or even better have a tool do it for me. My principle is that if I didn’t need any of the “None” emails in a week – I won’t need them. Of course, I’m going to move out all the important ones from my “None” category to other category. I know storage is cheap but still – why should I be burdened with information that will hurt my email experience.