Effective Email Strategy
Mark Hurst offers a GoodExperience report on strategies for helping your employees to manage their email. Skip the first 8 pages and cut to the chase. The problem is not the number of incoming messages you receive; the problem is the number that pile up, awaiting action, demanding attention.
"Achieving simplicity -- or emptiness in this case -- takes time, practice, and continual improvement."
We all know how to use our email systems -- both the programs themselves and the filing and filtering strategies we've adopted. It may prove profitable, from time to time, to return fresh to the problem, to look again at the tools we already know and learn to use them better.Hurst tells us, "Don't use your inbox as a todo list: use a ToDo list."
"Allowing new e-mails to pile onto old e-mails overnight yields an especially demoralizing sight in the morning: an inbox filled with new work and yesterday's unfinished work."