TAMING THE E-MAIL MONSTER 

Has e-mail taken over your Inbox? Taken over your life? If just looking at your Inbox makes you feel stressed or frustrated,
you are not alone. According to current research, American professionals spend more than 40 percent of the work day on email
and information storage, and consider a third of the time wasted. ¹ More statistics: the average employee receives and
sends something like 140 e-mail messages a day according to Osterman Research. Every day, there is an avalanche of
disorganized information waiting to be read, sorted, answered, acted upon, and deleted. Mike Song, co-author of "The Hamster
Revolution: How to Manage Your E-mail Before it Manages You", says about e-mail "People have reached the breaking point". ²

Worldwide, e-mail volume is said to be rising at a rate of 20 per cent annually, with 135 billion e-mails sent each day in 2005.

Clearly, it is time to ask yourself whether you manage your email or whether your email manages you. The answer might surprise you. For example, how many times a day do you check your e-mail? In a study, a third of British employees told
researchers they checked their Inbox every fifteen minutes and 64 percent said they looked more than once an hour. After
researchers fitted monitors to their computers, the employees were found to be viewing e-mails up to 40 times an hour. No
wonder that more than a third of the employees reported feeling stressed by the volume of e-mails and the need to reply quickly. ³

1 "Stop that e-mail eating up your day", The Birmingham News, January 28, 2007, 1B.
2 "Stop that e-mail eating up your day", at 1B.
3 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/
article2246434.ece.

Are you one of those who have hundreds or even thousands of e-mails in your Inbox so that your Inbox has become a massive filing cabinet? Or worse, do you use the Deleted Items folder for filing old e-mails, which is akin to using a trash can for storing your important papers? If you answered "yes" to these questions, then chances are e-mail is managing you.

So what do you do to win the war on e-mail overload? There are those who suggest the only way to score a decisive victory over e-mail madness is to maintain a Zero Inbox. Merlin Mann of 43Folders.com fame writes about taking an overstuffed mailbox to zero and keeping it that way. It requires you to delete ruthlessly every day.

I must confess that my Inbox is not empty. At the moment, it contains 67messages. Its just too hard for me to let go of all those little bits of information. I have benefitted, however, from what you could call a project or client folder approach to archiving e-mail. This approach starts with turning off the Auto-Archive feature of Microsoft Outlook. Then you create separate folders inside Outlook that mirrors the same folder structure you have for your paper files. Whenever you send or receive an e-mail that you want to keep, move it to it's appropriate folder. Folders for completed projects or cases should be moved out of Outlook and archived with the rest of the information on that project or case.

The client or project folder approach to archiving e-mail is described in The Professional's Guide to E-Mail Management in
Microsoft Outlook, which is available for download at www.addins4outlook.com.

Here are some more strategies that can have a big impact on your e-mail load:

• Treat your Inbox like a To-Do list. It should only contain the e-mails that you still need to read or take action on.
• When you have finished with an e-mail, promptly file it out of the Inbox into another folder if you need it for future reference. Delete it if you don't need it for future reference.
• Avoid looking at your Inbox first thing in the morning. The e-mails in your Inbox often represent the priorities of others. This may be different from your own priorities. If you start your work day by looking at your e-mail, you could easily end up in a fire-fighting mode. Instead, start your day by opening your Calendar, which should reflect what you need and want to
  accomplish that day.
• Turn off the sound that signals incoming e-mail. This should help you to avoid the constant interruptions that come with continually checking each e-mail as it comes in. Better to select three or four times during the day when you're going to go through your e-mail and stick to the schedule. This should help you to read and respond to e-mails in batches, rather than every time a new one arrives.
• If you send fewer messages, you will probably get fewer messages. So, consider whether an e-mail is truly needed. Would it be more appropriate to telephone or walk to the person's office? Also, think about whether your e-mail is targeted to the proper recipients. It may not be necessary to hit "reply all" or "cc:".
• Remove yourself from mailing lists or listservs you don't find useful.
• Put specific subject headers in all the e-mails that you send. When recipients reply, your header will carry over. That way your stored e-mails will have clear subject lines. You will save time not having to search through lots of vague subject headers like "FYI", "Meeting" or "Question".
• Don't print out e-mails. According to the latest ABA Legal Technology Survey Report, an incredible 61 per cent of lawyers print paper copies of their e-mail to save it. 4Printing out e-mails increases the amount of paper you have to deal with and it wastes time. You can file and retrieve e-mail more quickly on your computer.
• Turn it off! Try not to read or answer e-mail during your personal time.