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Showing items tagged with "email overload" - 128 found.

Email overload – managing it during half term

Ways to reduce the volume of email awaiting your return after a break for half-term include:

1. Prioriting what you really need in your inbox and using rules to divert the rest to folders to read later in the week.
2. Sending the lot to the Deleted folder and then including a line in your Out of Office message to tell people to re-send it if its urgent.
3. Using colour and views on your return if it’s too late to do 1 or 2.

More suggestions can be found in ‘Brilliant Email‘ which of course you could always buy in any good book store and read on your break!!

Tags: email overload

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No reply – email overload or arrogance

No reply is it email overload, arrogance or plain bad manners?  Recently a well established trade magazine asked for volunteers to write expert columns.  They never either acknowledged or replied to my email.  Is this because they feel no need to demonstrate the basic simple courtesy just blogged by Ted Coine or is the requesting editor’s email inbox so overstuffed they don’t read half their emails?

Tags: email etiquette, email overload

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Email Addiction II – more tips and hints

Are you an email junkie?  Email addiction is a costly to you and your business (even you love life).  We become distracted from the task in hand.  It drives up stress levels.   In can also be the underlying source of chronic email overload and poor email etiquette as your respond in haste to new emails.

Are you an email junkie? Check -download our Email Addiction self-assessment tool. 

Here are three more tips to help you on the road to being less of an email junkie and freeing up some time for other tasks which might have a more positive impact on your productivity and health.

1. Make sure you have all the new email notifications switched off.
2. Set yourself an email free time zone when you concentrate on the task in-hand – anything from twenty minutes to two hours and keep to it.
3. Tempted to take a peak – find a distraction – go see a colleague, take walk, have a coffee.

Tags: email addiction, email management, email overload

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Email Addiction – ways to cure it

Last week’s UK launch of Clean Out Your Inbox Week seems to have been a great success.  I am still sorting through all the emails, tweets and other messages.  So please bear with me and a summary will be available at the end of the week.

The launch of our new Email Addiction self-assessment tool seemed to hit a hot spot.  One of the problems with this sort of addiction is that there are no drugs to treat the affliction.  It all has to be driven by personal behavioural change and from within yourself.  As Susan Maushart’s book The Winter of Out Disconnect shows you might also find another you and another hidden skills set.

Here are five ways to start gently curing the curse of this modern day drain on productivity.

1. Set yourself some specific email free time (eg from 30 minutes to two hours).
2. Reward yourself handsomely when you reach the goal time.
3. Fine yourself if you take a peak in between and make the fine psychologically painful.
4. Tell people what you are doing and enlist their help.
5. Provide an incentive for them to contact you by alternative ways (eg talk to you).

More tips and  hints on Twitter this week.

Tags: email addiction, email overload

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Email etiquette – the cost to business of poor grammer and spelling

What picture of the sender does an email convey which contains, spelling mistakes, poor grammar and is badly structured?  To me, it’s one of a sloppy person who does not really care, an email written in haste maybe?  For many of my clients such emails can be very expensive especially when the contents are incorrect and they end up in court as evidence.
Alternatively, either a prospect or client feels the sloppy email is a reflection of the service they either are or will receive.  The question which often comes up in workshops is ‘should an email be as perfect as a letter’?  In a word ‘yes’, regardless of whether it is internal or external.  Why worry about internal communications?  They so often slip outside, forwarded carelessly and in haste.

Moreover, sloppy emails often result in more email overload because either you need to read and re-read the email to decipher what the sender is saying or you play endless rounds on unnecessary email ping-pong.  For some of my clients this can be very costly and especially when English is not the mother tongue: shipments are missed, products specifications wrongly interpreted.  Has this ever happened to you?
Here are three tips on good email etiquette for the content:

1. Write in clear plain English.
2. No text speak please, the workforce is still predominantly Generation X.
3. Check not only the spelling but what the spell checker is doing.  (How many people apologise for the incontinence instead of the inconvenience!) 

What are your top tips?  Do you think an email should be as perfect as a letter?

Tags: email etiquette, email overload

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