A job I had in the past, everyday, I would get up to a 100 emails per day(I was managing a team).
99% of it was garbage.
One time, I came back to more than 2000 emails from vacations. I told my boss that I would mark them as read and to fill me in on what I nees to look out for, otherwise I would never have gone through all the garbage.
I’ve started using email filter rules. Put emails from the key people I work with into an urgent folder. Auto-delete automated reports and updates. Everything else can wait…or get deleted. If an email hasn’t been replied to for 2 weeks and the world is carrying on then it couldn’t have been that important. If it was important then people tend to phone about it.
The problem is that everything gets mixed into a single mass…petty squabbles, automated newsletters, “CC you for info”, etc are mixed in with emails that say “immediate response required for new serious litigation disaster”.
I never auto-delete automated crap. Mark as read and stick it in a folder outside Inbox. Leave it alone until retention policy auto-deletes it.
They’ll know you received it either way. If they want to flood you with useless crap that you could just as easily ad-hoc if you actually needed it, make them pay to store it.
Just don’t be like my customers who auto-bin emails that come from our fucking ticketing system, are created by a human, and are asking for specifics on their request.
A job I had in the past, everyday, I would get up to a 100 emails per day(I was managing a team).
99% of it was garbage.
One time, I came back to more than 2000 emails from vacations. I told my boss that I would mark them as read and to fill me in on what I nees to look out for, otherwise I would never have gone through all the garbage.
I’ve started using email filter rules. Put emails from the key people I work with into an urgent folder. Auto-delete automated reports and updates. Everything else can wait…or get deleted. If an email hasn’t been replied to for 2 weeks and the world is carrying on then it couldn’t have been that important. If it was important then people tend to phone about it.
The problem is that everything gets mixed into a single mass…petty squabbles, automated newsletters, “CC you for info”, etc are mixed in with emails that say “immediate response required for new serious litigation disaster”.
I never auto-delete automated crap. Mark as read and stick it in a folder outside Inbox. Leave it alone until retention policy auto-deletes it.
They’ll know you received it either way. If they want to flood you with useless crap that you could just as easily ad-hoc if you actually needed it, make them pay to store it.
Just don’t be like my customers who auto-bin emails that come from our fucking ticketing system, are created by a human, and are asking for specifics on their request.