Antonio Buena, PMP

No matter what work you're in, emails are a mess and it competes with time for productive activities. The sad state of this mess often bury more important messages in favor of non-sensical letters. Learn to know when to set time for e-mail and went to pass it up and move on to more productive things. I tend to look e-mails from the Pareto rule of a perspective where I try to devote 80% of my time to the more important 20% of my e-mails.

Here's my process for doing this:

1. Empty In-box
   I always keep my in-box empty. Even back when I was receiving 250-500 e-mails in the morning I still make it point to clean it all up. No, I don't read all 250-500 I just prioritize what needs responding. Most of it also are routed to other folders via filters.


2. Use Filters
   A lot of the e-mail programs now have filters or 'rules' that help you sort out mails as they come in. Make sure you have this turned on and setup properly. I use filters for spam, product alert e-mails, or other identified non-important e-mails where they can be placed into a folder to be read at a later time. Using filters opens up reading time for other more important messages.


3. Scan, Flag and Drop
   Once messages are filtered with non-urgent and unimportant messages I do three things upon reading the mails:
   
   
   
   1. Quick scan of the emails
   
   
   2. Flag mails that need my response
   
   
   3. Drag and drop mails on their specific folders as I go through them.
   
   
   
   No replies are made at this juncture.
   
   Describing the steps in detail:
   Quick scan is a quick run through of the mail without thinking or making any response. Basically it's just a quick look on the following:
   
   
   
   • Does this e-mail need my response
   
   
   • Does this require immediate attention or can this wait
   
   
   • How important is this mail
   
   
   
   E-mails that meet the above criteria are flagged and placed on their specific folders. Having a quick pass before responding gives perspective and time to prioritize e-mails focusing on more important e-mails.
   
   
   
   Once the cycle is done and the inbox is cleaned, I start answering those that are flagged and ticking them out one by one. The idea here is to clean out all flagged items at the soonest time. No flagged items means no pending items.


4. Maintain a Good Folder Architecture
   Here's my folder layout
   
   
   
   • _Done
   
   
   • Project 1
   
   
   • Project 2
   
   
   • Personal Folder
   
   
   • Archive
     
     
     
     • Year-Month
     
     
     • Year-Month
     
     
   
   
   
   _Done - This is the drop folder for all the e-mails I receive that can't be placed in the project folders. The special character at the front places the folder at the top of the list. It only contains correspondence for the current month.
   
   Project 1 and 2 are ONGOING projects. Be very vigilant with the project folders because it can potentially get out of hand. Having separate project folders works for me because it makes for easier documentation and closing out on communication files at the end of the project.
   
   Personal folder
   Personal drop folder for info, announcements.
   
   Archive
   Monthly folders of the _Done folder.
   I move messages from the previous month at the start of each month and place them in each of their archived folder.
   
   You can also save space by maintaining only a certain number of months of these archived folders.