Wrestle That Email to the Ground
November 8th 2008 -
You step away for five minutes from your computer, where you’ve been striving to answer your email. When you return, you have eleven more messages stacked up in your inbox. Email has the potential of being your biggest time-saver and friend. Email is often a major source of frustration and wasted time.
Why the paradox? While email can make life easier by bringing you valuable information quickly, most of the time there’s just too much of it! And so much of it is unnecessary! Like a runaway steer, “that Thar thing” has got to be controlled. So let’s jump on the problem right out of the chute and wrestle it to the ground. You can corral the junk before it gets to your screen! If you’re not using a good anti spam software, statistics suggest that most of the email you receive is the electronic equivalent of junk mail. Your local office supply or electronics store should have a vast selection of software that can easily help you eliminate spam from hitting your in box. Tip: Don’t respond to spammers’ messages, even to ask them to remove your name from their lists. That just spurs them to continue spamming you, because they know you’re actually looking at the email. You can ask friends and family to stop forwarding messages. It’s nice that they want to pass along “cute” or “important” messages. And a lot of the information they send is good, I’m sure. But it’s not good for you to have to deal with all of it. So just get up the nerve to send out a polite request to people in your address book. They’ll get over it. And you’ll be amazed at the time you save when you no longer feel compelled to open and read all of those messages. Also do delete with enthusiasm. Spammers are masterful at thinking of ways to make you think they are writing an important personal message to you. But if you don’t know who sent a message or can’t decipher what the subject line is about, press “delete” in a heartbeat. Whole groups can be deleted with one swipe, if you learn how to do that trick on your computer. And take care of easy responses first. Go to the email that can be dealt with quickly. If you can respond in just one or two lines, with thirty seconds of typing, do it! Get it off your radar. Get it off your screen. Get it off your plate. Then move on. Write less! You don’t need to make each email your finest example of information sharing, wisdom, and prose. Just keep the conversation moving, writing quick responses. Stop composing the next great novel and burst out of the chute, or that steer will get away from you. If you’ve been waiting to respond to certain messages until you have enough time to do it properly, grab that bull by the horns, type an adequate response (not the perfect one you’d imagined), and move on—guilt free! By writing shorter messages, you’ll save time for those who receive them too. A former agent of mine often responded to information I sent with a one word message—Noted. Now that is a quick response.