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

Start the Year with a Clean Inbox

Would you like to start the year with a clean inbox and learn how to keep it clean and reduce email overload?   Join Mesmo Consultancy for the 7th International Clean Out Your Inbox week January 20 to 24.  This year the email babes (Marsha Egan and myself) are thrilled to be joined by Steuart Snooks, Australia’s leading email management expert.We have created a dedicated Facebook page from which you will be able to access lots of new materials (from tips and hints to interviews with other leading email management experts).  This is in addition to the daily blogs and Twitter tips to help you each day.

Click here to join our Facebook page and Like us please.

Follow me on Twitter (as Emaildoctor) using #cleaninbox.

More details to follow next week.  Meanwhile, happy new year and thank you for your support during 2013.  It was much appreciated.  We look forward to seeing you in 2014.

Tags: Clean Inbox Week, email management, email overload, Marsha Egan, Steuart Snooks

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Top five tips to improve email cyber security over Christmas

Here are our top five tips to help you relax and reduce the risk of  cyber crime happening to either you or your business for example, identity theft, denial of service, loss of sensitive data and home burglary etc. The key is to disconnect but if you find that hard then be discrete about what you say and post.

1. Go ‘cold turkey’ over the holiday, at least on Christmas and Boxing Day.
2. Set a safe and simple Out of Office.
3. Avoid posting on social media sites about presents and where you will be, especially if you are going away.
4. Watch out for unusual emails which will probably be phishing emails taking you to bogus websites that may capture your personal details.
5. Never email under the influence of drink – when your judgement and vision could be impaired.

For some more suggestions on how reduce email overload overload and to take time our from the digital world and especially from email click here to see my latest blog on Huffington.co.uk.  The article also contains ways to re-balance your work-life balance and reduce stress.

If all else fails you might want to check your level of email addiction click here to start.  At Mesmo Consultancy have helped may business people reduce their level of email addiction and improve their work-life balance.  Call us for an informal discussion about how we can help you.

Tags: cyber crime, email addiction, email overload, Huffington.co.uk, Mesmo Consultancy

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Email disasters -Old emails turn like bad pennies and can be expensive

Email disaster happen time and time again.  Over fifteen years of writing two books on email best practice and many articles, not surprisingly I have files full of email media disasters from the early stories of naughty Claire Swire emails to the more serious ones where Kirsty Walk asked her PA to hack into someone else’s inbox to retrieve some damaging emails.

When will we learn that no matter how hard we try to erase an email we wish we had never sent, someone will have a copy.  Furthermore as we become increasingly litigiousness many organisation now archive all email traffic in and out of their servers. Two press stories prompted me to write again on this topic.  First, there is the phone hacking trial in which copious evidence is email related.  At one point the management team tried to destroy all old emails only to find not surprisingly that they had been archived by their mail provider.

Second, was the recent email trail between Ed Miliband and a senior aide which branded Ed  Balls as a ‘nightmare’.  This was a classic case of not only putting something stupid into an email but then compounding the felony by sending it to the wrong  person!

What can we do to avoid such email scandals which seem to now occur regularly?  Recall the email.  No that doesn’t work as I now have it and am intrigued why you are recalling it.

Here are my top three tips:

1. Pause before hitting send and ask yourself what will be the consequence if this email is taken out of context?  Is this something that I want other people to know about?
2. Write a rules which sends all your emails to the draft box before they actually leave your device.
3. Check and re-check that you are sending the email to the right Frank Smith/Jane Wise.

Most people feel compelled to either reply instantly they receive a new email or fire off an email when feeling cross.  This usually results in unnecessary emails chains which often spiral into email wars and drive up the email overload.  There is a time and place for chatting and gossip but email is not that place.

Do you want to reduce the risk that someone in your organisation will make an email faux pass?  Call us now and ask about how our Brilliant Email Management masterclass can help you and your organisation prevent such email disasters (which are often very expensive in terms of damage limitation PR and putting people on gardening leave).

Meanwhile, dare to share, what are your tips for avoiding an email disaster?  Have you ever been subject such an email scandal?

Tags: email disasters, email management training, email overload, email scandals

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Twenty five top tips to save time

A couple of weeks or ago I had the pleasure and honour of running a Brilliant Email Management workshop for over one hundred NHS PAs at the NHS PAs for Excellence  Wales conference.   Here are their top tips for reducing email overload and using excellent email etiquette to save time.

1. Creating rules eg for Cc’d emails; spam; junk emails; meeting planners; newsletter
2. Drag and drop into folders
3. Subject line – note what is required within the subject line, eg for action/for info/respond by…/
4. One topic – one email
5. System emails on server instead of BB
6. Using information like ‘no response required’ or ‘action required’ in subject line
7. When filing an email in a sub-folder, change the subject to one that fits/is more suitable to your filing or better suits the reason for keeping the email
8. Make sure that the content is polite and no ambiguity – plain speech
9. Switch off new email alert and try to check emails only three times a day
10. Drag and drop emails into calendar/task pad for reminders eg complete survey by ‘date’ in good time
11. Use the Out of Office message to manage sender’s expectations of when I will reply
12. Colour code incoming emails
13. Editing in situ
14. Only put your signature once in an email
15. 4D rule: Deal; Delete; Delegate or Defer
16. Drag and drop emails to task pad
17. Send a link not a file
18. Things change; never be afraid to ask people to remove you from contact lists, distribution groups that are no longer relevant
19. Use the facilities available – learn how to use Outlook to its full potential
20. Check for typos before pressing ‘send’
21. Keep emails succinct and relevant
22. Plan emails, draft, review etc, if needed and ensure that the recipient needs to avoid return emails with questions
23. Say it in the subject line – ‘EOM’ end of message
24. Five bullet points maximum
25. ‘Thank you in advance for your assistance’ is my favourite phrase – regrets having to thank someone afterwards

What would you add as your favorite tip?

Tags: Brilliant Email, email etiquette, email overload, email rules, email subject line, NHS PAs for Excellence, Twenty five top tips

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The tortoise approach to reducing email overload

Over the last month I have noticed myself increasingly unable to focus and do any blue sky thinking.  Is it age?  ‘When I am Sixty Four’ by the Beetles does have a certain resonance with me.  Having just won two significant pieces of silver on the golf course, given a couple of major presentations  and been recruiting for a new CEO for the Dorset Chamber of Commerce that might not seem likely. Then  I checked my email and social networking behavior.

Tortoise approach to email overload

Several articles have caught my attention recently.  Two related to the tortoise and hare fable.  First was Schumpeter’s ‘In praise of laziness’ and second was Susie Boyt’s ‘Tortoises knows a thing or two’.  Both urge us to slow down and know when it’s time to stop and take stock.  We are bombarded with emails night and day and the urge to check them every few minutes has created two serious new diseases: email overload and email addiction both of which I have frequently written.  Was I now falling victim to  one of both of them?

The third article to make me sit up was Emma Jacobs’s ‘Help to get a good night’s sleep’.  Checking your emails late at night is know to be disruptive and can result in disturbed sleep patterns.  In this recent article by Emma Jacobs she again stresses the need for down time to create a quiet mind which in turns enables us to focus and feel less stressed.

Monitoring my connectivity for 48 hours I realised I had slipped into some appalling and destructive habits:

• checking my emails late at night after an evening meeting/night out socially;
• letting new emails disturb my train of thought;
• simply deleting unwanted newsletters etc rather than unsubscribing;
• surfing Twitter and social networking sites for no particular reason – well maybe to see if anyone had picked on one of my posts.

In short I was suffering from chronic email and information overload which in turn was creating attention deficit.  Here is the five point action plan I prescribed myself.

1. Hibernate my inbox from unwanted emails: be ruthlessly unsubscribing from every newsletter I delete because it is of no interest (either opened or not).
   

   Email overload medicine

2. Hibernate all my electronic devices between 10.00 pm and 8.00 am. (If anyone really needs me they know my landline number.)
3. Hibernate my inbox for at least one hour intervals and hence reduce the number of times I check my emails.
4. Hibernate the email function of my smart phone fifteen minutes before meetings and whilst out walking and socialising.
5. Hibernate after reading emails and remember that not every email needs a reply.

In other words become a tortoise more often during the day and take time to look around, smell the roses, and let my mind wander free of clutter and other people’s actions lists.  Is the anti-email overload medicine working.  Its early days but my mind does seem quieter and gradually I am regaining my ability to blue sky and think outside the box.  Next is to re-start practicing mindfulness and review my eating habits.

Tags: email and mindfullness, email and sleep, email overload, email overload medicine, tortoise and email overload

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