#055 Ctrl-Alt-DeleShawn

While I was off for the past two weeks, the emails in my office inbox were piling up.

The raw stats are this:

Period: February 10th to 14th and February 17th to 21st.

Emails received: 667

Time to download the email approx 40 minutes.

Emails Deleted: 555

Emails requiring attention: 112

Emails requiring a reply: 57

Time until the last email was answered (including d/l time): 2 hours 24 minutes. 

I AM AN EMAIL BOSS!

I love taking time off, I HATE having to sort through email.  Over time I’ve created a quick strategy that allows me to blow through the madness.

1) Open a  preview pane open in inbox.

2) Sort by sender.

3) Delete by sender. (with 99.9% accuracy, I can delete tens if not hundreds of emails in an instant solely by who sent me the email. There are a few exceptions to this but with a quick review of Subject Line or the preview pane and I can keep it or chuck it with no time wasted.)

4) Once all of the deletes are made I keep the sort ‘by person’ and with 3 sub-folders I sort whose emails are “High Priority”, “Medium Priority”, or “Low ‘I’ll get back to you when I get back to you’ Priority”. *

5) Then I go into the individual sub-folders, sort by date and answer.

* Basically, My immediate Boss or higher is “High Priority”. "Medium Priority" are from my co-worker on issues t from my clients that she was unable to resolve. "Low Priority" are all the clients that  would have received my Auto-Responder stating I’d be off for two weeks but did not resend to our departmental mass email address (that I’d also receive a copy of, thereby knowing if they followed the correct procedure to ensure they’d get a reply.)

I have a standard opener for my replies to the Low Priority group, it’s basically… “Thank you for your email. As stated in the Auto-Responder you would have received when you sent your email, I was on vacation for the past two weeks. Your email is only being responded to now because you did not forward your email to the correct address (XYZ@WHEREIWORK.COM)...

Some people never learn, but I feel that no case is hopeless, so I’ll remind you how hapless you really are. ;-) Overall though,  I have to say that my clients are learning.  I only had 3 Low Priority emails this time. (I recall about two summer’s ago it was more like 30).

Now if cleaning up all the errors my co-worker made in the past two weeks was as easy…