Our Email Inboxes, What it Says About Us and How to Better Manage Email

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Our Email Inboxes, What it Says About Us and How to Better Manage Email

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00:00 / 13:18

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Aired on January 15, 2020 on Mornings with Carmen with Carmen LeBerge at My Faith Radio, Bill English and Carmen about attention management – that to which we give attention during our work day.

We’ll discuss how to clean up your inbox and how to more tightly craft what comes into your email inbox and what you pay attention to.

Here are the show notes:

Core principle:  how we manage email indicates what we pay attention to

Idea:  Attention Management:  Preferred over time management or email management.  If you sit back and look at your core deliverables in your job, are you paying attention to that which helps you be successful or are you paying attention to things/conversations/people which distract you?

Principle:  By shaping what we allow into our inbox, we shape what we pay attention to and that should, in turn, help us deliver those things/elements/results which we are hired to deliver.

Underperforming people’s inboxes tend to have one or more of these characteristics:

1. Subscribed to email blasts which you never or rarely read
2. Do not take the time to delete or file emails:  Every email represents one of the following:
   1. A task assigned to you (added task on your task list)
   2. A reply needed by another (which is a type of task)
   3. Information which will be needed in the future (filing task)
   4. Information which is irrelevant to you (delete task)
   5. Opportunity to meet with someone (scheduling task)
   6. Marketing something to you in the hopes that you’ll buy something (likely a delete task)
   7. Legal hold on emails (legal tasks assigned to you which you MUST follow)
   8. Spam – (delete task)
3. What can you do to manage email better:
   1. Delete emails which you do not need to keep
      1. When searching through your inbox, you have less false positives
      1. When searching through your inbox, you have more true positives
      1. Smaller corpus is easier to manage long-term

3. File emails in a folder for projects, conversations and so forth – easier to retrieve information – even years later – by taking the time to file
4. Don’t subscribe to email blasts unless you really need the information
5. Openly ask people to take you off conversations in which you’re not interested and don’t need to be looped in
6. Use Quick Steps in Outlook to create tasks and calendar invitations off of emails
7. Use My Templates in Outlook to create automatic messages which can be sent back to marketing people asking yourself to be removed from their marketing email lists
8. Use the Inbox Rules to route emails automatically to folders for future reference

The last three steps can be learned through numerous online blog posts and a number of books on Outlook.