Responding or Maintaining Emails - best practice [closed]

Question

I would like to hear how you manage your emails when you get lot of emails on a day basis. Here some of the things that I follow,

1. Read emails and respond for 2 hours once. I will not disturb my work for intermediate emails unless until I got the email with high priority status.
2. Even I responded the emails, I maintain the incomplete tasks in a separate folder with follow-up tag and set reminder. I could do the proper follow up.
3. Usually archiving emails every month and take a backup of them in DVD. Email size quota issue can be avoided. As well as it wont take much time to configure if you have less number of emails in your server if you have to move to the another machine/laptop.
4. Created a rule to categorize the emails based on the To address and give more attention to the emails if it is directly addressed to me only.

Some of them above are not relevant or not needed for everyone. however, i feel that this is an important thing in management to have a smooth communication with higher/subordinate in any organization.

Answer 1

I'm actually using Google's priority inbox. I find I can glance over at my open gmail client and then actually look at anything which is flagged as a priority. Like you I prefer to work in blocks without having to read email every 10 seconds.

I then use Gmail's labeling system to indicate which client/project/whatever the email is for, and the time I need to respond by (usually I respond immeidately). I also use the 'star' to indicate that I'm expecting a response.

Answer 2

This is my personal way of doing things. It works for me, but maybe not other people.

For the most part, I don't delete emails. I use Thunderbird for work and Gmail for personal, and both have a fast search function that retrieves what I need quickly. I don't bother deleting because it does take time, and it turns out that I typically need emails later that I thought I wouldn't need.

I do delete certain emails I know I will not need, such as automated messages from our software tracking system, newsletters, timecard reminders, and the like.

For basic organizing, I use tags instead of sorting into folders. If I use folders I typically forget if I kept an email in my primary inbox folder or if I moved it to a folder, or what folder I moved it to. With tags I can easily put something into multiple categories and I don't have to remember what folders to search in (recursive searching is a pain in some email programs). Thunderbird has a ToDo tag so that you can maintain a list of emails that need attention.

Again, this works for me. I'm not a very organized person, so attempts at organization has a higher cost for me than it might for other people. I also don't do a great deal of work through email either.