While the usage of eMail has increased significantly in recent years, many employees struggle to keep up with the ever increasing flow of information. Why? Because their techniques for dealing with high loads of information have remained the same – the techniques you applied for 5 mails a day.

The increase of email in today’s workplace requires new techniques for dealing with email. Here is my solution:

The first three steps

The most important technique that I applied for beeing in control of my inbox is the rule to have an empty inbox whenever possible. In order to achieve this, I recommend the following steps:

1. Copy all emails from your inbox to a folder called “Temp”
2. Create a sub-folder in your mail program called “Action Necessary”
3. Create additional sub-folders to categorize your mail. I am using sub-folders for each project that I am working on, additional folders for literature, general business issues and administrative emails.

The second three steps
Now that you have set up your folder structure it is necessary to process the existing emails that you have copied to you “Temp” folder. Here is my process for this:

1. Sort the emails by sender, making it easier to delete a group of emails from one sender (i.e. newsletters you subscribed but don’t read). In this step I also recommend to take the time and unsuscribe from all these newsletters – you probably won’t read them anyway )
2. Now for each remaining email decide if
   • it is actionable (a task to do or a reply to write): move to folder “Action Necessary”
   • it should be stored in a specific sub-folder: move it to the folder
   • it can be deleted: then just delete it!
3. Make it your personal goal to keep your inbox empty at all times.

These steps helped me to stay in control of the emails in my inbox. In the beginning it might be hard to keep your inbox empty. Yet after a few days you will see a difference when you have gained control over your emails again and you don’t have to worry anymore about some email that might have gone missing somewhere in your inbox.

If you want to find more about techniques not just to deal with a lot of emails but with a lot of work I recommend the following book: