E-mail at Work

Do you get a lot of e-mail at work? I have some tips to make it a little better to deal with.

1. remove the priority column from your e-mail client. Some people like to send e-mail marked with a high priority. The majority of these people are assholes. My experience is that people use the priority flag as a passive-aggressive way for them to push their interests on you. After you remove this column you don’t even see that the message is of “high priority” so you treat it just the same as every other. It is a very calming way to handle e-mail.

2. move automated e-mails out of your inbox. Set up a filter to automatically move automated e-mails to folders other than your inbox. Messages such as a “spam block summary” or “software build completed” that are generated by a computer should be moved to a folder. If you wouldn’t normally read the message than you can also have the filter mark the message as read, so it doesn’t disrupt you with a new mail notification.

3. move messages that don’t address you specifically to their own folder. At work we are usually on a bunch of e-mail lists: all staff, division list, all Ottawa employees, etc. These lists tend to result in a lot of notification e-mails being sent to you that aren’t particularly important for whatever you are working on at that very moment–or maybe at all. Messages that don’t list you in the “To” or “Cc” fields explicitly can be automatically moved to a filtered inbox and marked read; just remember to check it once or twice a day.

I don’t get a thousand e-mails a day, but I do get enough that the aforementioned techniques make e-mail a lot more manageable for me. I have a few other mail filters but these cover move of the mail that I don’t want to read. And really, I’ll take any opportunity that I can to publicly call high priority e-mail senders out for what they really are.