Over the past several months, I’ve heard from a lot of people who receive a tremendous amount of e-mail.  They are seeking advice for dealing with e-mail. 

Examples

Joe owns a small business and recieves more than 500 messages per day and, at any given time, has over 1,000 unread messages. 

Pat receives about 750 messages per day and is considering hiring someone just to manage his e-mail.  Currently, Pat has a backlog of several thousand unread messages.

Challenges

Joe and Pat want to provide value to their networks, yet their current networking is not working for them. 

Both are trying to network with more than 5,000 people and run their businesses too. 

Information is getting lost or overlooked and important messages are falling through the cracks. 

Pat and Joe do not have time to deal with all the e-mail.

Objectives

When they contacted me, Joe and Pat had three concerns which are:

1. Dealing with the current backlog.
2. Prioritizing new messages they receive.
3. Minimizing the amount of time spent dealing with unnecessary e-mail.

Suggestions

Current backlog:

1. Have someone else handle the backlog.
2. Divide messages into items that are require no action, messages that others can deal with, and items that Pat and Joe must handle.

New messages:

1. Define their priorities.
2. Use the priorities to dispose of new messages.
3. Delegate messages to others, where possible.
4. Ignore messages on which they are copied.
5. Discourage people from copying them on messages.
6. Create a second e-mail address and use it only for messages from people that warrant higher degrees fo responsiveness.
7. Use autoreply or autoforward features for some messages so that they are routed to the appropriate person.

Minimize time:

1. Eliminate unnecessary e-mail by deciding what messages are unnecessary.  Use rules and filters to autosort messages, where possible.
2. Reduce time spend dealing with necessary messages by creating standard replies with tools such as ShortKeys.
3. Help people make good introductions by explaining what introductions have value to you.  Specifically identify who should be introduced, what you want to talk to the person about, how the introduction will be helpful to the other person.
4. Explain what opportunities and ideas are of interest to you by explaining what you are trying to accomplish and how people can help you accomplish that goal.  Be detailed so that people can provide you with the exact information you need to evaluate the opportunities and ideas.
5. Explain how you can help people in your network - who can you help, when can you help them, what can you help them with, and how people can make it easier for you to help them.  Be as specific as possible.  In addition, you may want to list situations where you cannot assist others.  

Filed by Coleen Davis at 8:07 pm under Business Tips, Resources, Tips for Students