Receiving more email than I can handle [closed]

Recently I have started receiving more email than I can handle. Because of this I sometimes forget to reply to an important email, or I spend more time tracking and replying to emails than I would like.

Any good tips for improving email productivity? I use mostly GMail and Mac's default Mail client. Changing email client is an option if it improves productivity.

Solution 1:

Here are my rules & tools for dealing with hundreds of messages a day. Adapt as it fits your style.

• Automated filtering: Any mailing lists, automated alerts that I don't have to look at right away, minutes of daily meetings etc go into folders. At the end of the day I browse the folders for anything that may warrant more attention.
• Folders: Some people are very good at classifying their archived mail into folders. I'm not. So folders are only used for automated or semi-automated filtering (sometimes it needs a manual pass). There are about 15 folders in use, under 4 or 5 branches.
• Archiving/deleting: Personally I want to keep a record of any significant mail so I have large archives where others will delete more. I will delete out-of-office replies and other admin junk right away. The main point is to get as much as possible out of the inbox as soon as you can -- anything that does not need an answer from me goes into the archive (or is deleted) as soon as I see it: it has to leave the inbox.
• The three minute rule: Will it take me 3 minutes or less to reply to a message? If yes, I answer as soon as I see it and archive.
• Revisiting the inbox: How often you need to check the inbox depends on your situation. At my most frantic, I checked the inbox at every new mail alert, did the cleaning out as described above (including answering everything that falls under the 3 min rule). Then, about 4 times a day, I went for a longer session regarding the messages that need a longer reply.

Solution 2:

Ignore the fluff and don't procrastanate, if you can deal with something when it arrives then deal with it.

I'm using Outlook at the moment and for every email that hits my inbox I do one of the following (in roughly decending order for importance):

• Read, reply to/forward/handle/deal with/etc, mark as complete, move to folder
• Read, flag (either Red/Blue/Yellow for Now/Today/Later) and move to folder
• Read, move to folder ("archive" it)
• Delete (eg spam/junk mail)

My Inbox folder only contains unsorted emails, its "perfect" state is empty with all emails sorted into folders and flagged/ticked/archived.

Within the inbox, is a folder hierarchy that defines what the emails within relate to, so to find those I still need to handle I've got search folders that each find one of the three flags I use for Now/Today/Later.

I deal with the emails in the Now box ASAP.
The Today box has to be empty before I go home.
And the Later box is normally for keeping track of conversations I'm CC'd into and don't want to lose track of.

Strictly, the Now folder should always be empty as those emails should be replied to straight away, but if I'm in the middle of something (eg, replying to another "now" email) or wading through a backlog after a holiday I tend to flag everything first and then deal with it all together.