The average business worker sends and receives over 120 business emails per day and spends nearly 30 percent of the workweek managing email. Together with personal email, 205 billion emails are sent emails each day—a number expected to increase over 16 percent to 246 billion emails in 2019.
Email overload can result in anxiety and feelings of guilt.
It can be stressful to see your Inbox growing out of control and there is an increased risk of missing important email correspondence. Productivity drops when you have to spend too much time dealing with those emails, and distractions increase with those email notifications.
Fortunately, there are solutions to email overload. To start with, we need to be able to categorize those emails that we receive so that we can move forward with organization and management techniques.
Make Three Lists
I recommend taking a look through your Inbox and making three lists. Keep those lists handy for the next steps.
- Red Category
- These are emails that you want to see in your Inbox, and that you don’t want to miss.
- Example: Emails from clients, customers, co-workers, vendors, contractors, etc.
- Yellow Category
- Identify those emails that you don’t want to miss, but can wait until the end of the day or end of the week.
- Example: Emails from friends and family, industry associations, school and church mail lists, etc.
- Green Category
- Identify those emails that you only want to deal with when you have the time.
- Examples: Newsletters, social media notifications, etc.
Once you have your three lists, you can work on an organization strategy for those emails. You can create folders for those yellow and green category emails and set up email filters so that they will automatically be delivered to those folders instead of cluttering up your inbox.
The folks at SaneBox, an email management app, have written a post here that you might find interesting: Email Triage, and you can read further advice from me here: 4 Step to Becoming More Responsive
Need some one-on-one or group help with your email management?
