Sunday, August 24, 2008

Types of Email Overload

Why is Email (our most important communications tool) draining so much of our time, energy and passion?

Last week I emailed the list with a question. Firstly, thank you for all your fantastic feedback. It is clear that while email is our main communications tool, it is causing a lot of PAIN as well.

The answers I received from you can be broken down into 5 main categories.

  1. Too Many Emails - finding a system (and the time) to read and reply to them all
  2. Organizing, Filing and Finding Emails - how to file the emails in a manner that we can find them quickly when we need to refer to them
  3. Mistakes by the People we communicate with … sending us incomplete information, sending us unnecessary information, sending us emails with inaccurate subjects etc … or as one reader put it PSEUDO-SPAM
  4. Problems with Outlook … Outlook crashing or slowing down etc
  5. SPAM - not one I agree with but I'll talk more about this in the report.

I am about to release a report on my findings with a solution that will eliminate some of the email stress in a few days time. If you want to get a copy of the report when it is ready, go to this link.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The flip side is getting people to read your emails. For half the emails I send in a day I have to follow up with a couple of reminders. So half the time I end up going to Sent Items, flagging the mail for follow up, and moving it to Inbox. I was searching for a way to automate this when I found this site. I would be very grateful for an article that would show me how to get Outlook to do that automatically.