How many times do you find yourself overwhelmed with flurry of mails? Do you struggle everyday to catch up with your mails?
One of the challenges in the global IT world today is ever increasing mail traffic both during the day and night. The extreme competitive nature of the IT industry demands quick responses and the intrusion of handy gadgets have made it more demanding. It has almost become second nature to keep keying away either to write mails or respond to them. Is there a way to keep this mail menace under control?
Luckily, there are ways to tame the dragon to a larger extent. While most people have, over the period, evolved their own means to deal with the menace, here are a few effective ways:
- Keep official mail boxes strictly for official mails. Do not entertain friends on office mailbox.
- Most mail clients support junk filter. Make sure you have enabled junk filters to weed out spam.
- Use mail client rules engine effectively. Typically, mails sent directly to you would be requiring a response and not the once that are copied to you. Use the priority order when dealing with multiple mails.
- Enable mail indexing on your system for effective search of mails.
- Just do not put it off. Deal with mails as soon as possible. Better today than tomorrow (before more mails flood your mailbox).
- Set aside a fixed timeslot everyday to clear all mails.
While you are doing your best to deal with your mails, do be cognizant of similar predicament of people at the receiving end. So, make sure that you:
- Do not spam mail boxes of others. Think twice before shooting off an email. There are probably other ways of communication – messenger, phone, or just walk across the cubicle and talk, etc.
- Use read receipts & priority tagging of mails judiciously.
- Make sure you capture the intent and content of the mail clearly. Most of the mail ping-pongs are because of missing clarity in the initial mail. Keep them crisp and short.
- Use proper subject lines for mails. This can help the receiving person gauge the importance of the mail.
- Use spell checkers to weed out typos.
There possibly are other means, but the above suggests surely will give you a good start in dealing with the mail 'mess'ages.
Good Luck!
