Let us face it: email is a blessing and a curse. When it works, it is a great way to stay in touch and run business. When it overwhelms you, productivity drops to a total halt.
How annoying email is to you, depends a lot on the organization you work for. If the email culture is good – it is at best survivable. If it is not, may someone have mercy you – because your email inbox will not. Let that someone be me!
I work for a large IT-organization – and let me tell you right away: we do NOT have a good email culture. On a typical work day, I receive somewhere between 100 and 300 emails – most of which are irrelevant.
Mail rules are your friends! Let me give you a deep look at how I survive my email using the power of mail rules. This example will use Outlook, but will work for most mail clients. The system I use is very simple to set up and works great for me – even for handling large amounts of email traffic.
Folder structure
I use a very simple folder structure for my email. Too many folders and things just get confusing. It looks like this:
- Inbox
- CC
- Team Mail
- Wide Audience
- Category 1
- Category 2
- Category 3
- Category 4
- Category 5 (yes, just 5)
- Trash
- Junk E-Mail (Auto handled by my mail server)
- Sent Items
- Search Folders
- For Follow Up
- Daily Mail (Optional)
- Weekly Mail (Optional)
Let us see how my mail rules distribute things into these folders.
Rule 1 – I don’t want your email!
This is electronic survival at its most primitive, and it forms the basis of my entire mail system.
The first rule of my mail client says this:
where my name is not in the To box
move it to the Wide Audience folder
Sounds too aggressive? Not at all. Most people I have spoken with create rules for mail they DON’T want to receive. That is an eternal, uphill battle. The number of things that are irrelevant in the world keeps growing at exponential rate, the number of things that are relevant – don’t. This rule also guards against me being spammed on mailing lists that I did not ask to be a member off.
Just say no - automatically! Basically: Unless I say it is relevant, don’t bother me.
Sounds crazy so far? Read on…
Rule 2 – Don’t CC me if you want me to take action
People don’t know how to use CC. If I am CC on something, it means that I am NOT supposed to take action – if you fail to grasp that: learn email culture. I teach people the hard way: I only read my CC mail once a week. The rule says this:
where my name is in the Cc box
move it to the CC folder
except where my name is in the To box
stop processing more rules
It does happen that people send a mail both as CC and To – often as a mistake. As you can see, I guard myself against that above. The “stop processing more rules” prevents rule 1 from kicking in for CC mails.
Rule 3 – Boss rule
I don’t want to miss mails from my boss, my boss’ boss or the CEO – no matter if they are for me or not
from Boss or Boss’ Boss or CEO
play ding.wav
and flag the message for Follow up Today
except where my name is in the Cc box
But, notice that even the people higher in the food chain better learn about Rule 2 to get in touch with me. Another thing to notice about this rule is my use of the follow up flag. The other mail rules will still sort mails from my boss and throw them into the correct folders, but the follow up flag will make sure I check the mail today, even if it gets sorted to a folder that I only check occasionally.
In other words, I retain the sorting, but I also need to take action.
Rule 4 – High importance
This is the way to ninja yourself into my mailbox. My reason for this rule is: I should probably at least look at a mail that is marked high importance, no matter how it arrived to me. Just like the Boss Rule, I use the follow up flags to keep track of this:
marked as high importance
play ding.wav
and flag message for Follow up Today
Rule 3 and Rule 4 together are the only time that I want email to interrupt me. In all other cases, replies can wait.
Rule 5 – Travel
This rule basically moves all mail from my travel agency and booking agent to a Travel folder in my inbox. I sync these mails to my phone to make sure I always have my itinerary handy.
from Travel Agency or Booking Agent
move it to the Travel folder
and stop processing more rules
My Travel Agency sends me all sort of scare mails about the 0.0001% chance I have of dying from H1N1 when visiting Northern Europe and the 0.0002% chance that I will die horribly from Ebola Zaire when going anywhere south of Sahara. I have a special rule to get rid of those mails – you may want to do the same.
Rule 6 – Team mail
The team I work for has a few mailing lists that are always relevant. Inside the team, we have a good mail culture (it must have taken some good gardening, considering the overall company culture).
I have a rule to capture team mail, since I normally have to at least stay in sync with it. The rule is simple
sent to Team Mailing list 1 or Team Mailing List 2
move it to Team Mail folder
and stop processing more rules
Rule 7 – Smart people I trust
There are people outside my team that write really good, relevant and smart mails. I don’t want to miss their great mail and enjoy reading most of the stuff they write. This rule is to make sure this ends in my inbox:
from Smart Guy 1 or Smart Girl 2 or …
stop processing more rules
This rule, while deceptively simple, keeps the other rules from kicking in and just keeps the smart peoples email directly in my inbox.
Rule 8+ – mailing lists I want to read
In my company, we have LOTS of mailing lists that you can join. I want to read a fraction of them. Sometimes, we even have two mailing lists with the same subject.
For each list I want to read, I have a rule that says this:
sent to Mailing List
move it to Category folder
and stop processing more rules
Notice that the other rules will still apply to mailing lists. For example, if someone sends a high important mail – I will be notified and the mail will be correctly sorted at the same time.
I have a small taxonomy (typically no more than 5 categories) that I use to group mailing lists in. The mail rules sort the right mailing lists into the right categories for me.
Summary and work habit
With the 8 above rules, I easily manage hundreds of email per day. My routine is this:
- Morning: Check everything in my Inbox root folder, the Team Mail and the For Follow up Folder
- I know that these are only things that were explicitly sent to me or that I need to read right away.
- Recently, I got lazy and just created a search folder for these three
- During day: Get interrupted only by the “ding” sound when my bosses mails me or when someone sends a mail with high importance
- Evening: Repeat morning check.
- Potentially skim through CC mails
- Monday: Have a look at the category folders and follow mailing lists.
- Monthly: View the Wide Audience Folder in the threaded view.
- Using the threaded view I can quickly see which mails “sorted themselves out”.
- It is amazing how many mails become irrelevant if you just let the sender (spammer in this case) linger a bit. Often, at the time I see this mail, someone will have written one of those RTFM mails
I have found the “default throw away” system described here a highly efficient way to manage my email. Try it out and let me hear your feedback.
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