In the daily course of our works, we come across numerous emails from colleagues and clients as well as countless other unsavory emails uncaught by the junk filters. For the most part, it’s quick and easy to spot those unsavory emails and press the DEL key.
We all know the popular sayings of “Knowledge = Power” and what is knowledge if not information? It implies, then, that having too much knowledge is a bad thing. The real problem is that we often get copied on messages that our friends and colleagues think would help us in our daily duties when in reality they hinder us from completing our tasks effectively and timely. Then there’s the problem of people conversing using emails instead of using the more immediate communication tools such as instant messenger, phone or even simply walking-by for a chat(when it seems a walk-by-and-chat is appropriate).
So when we do get in the crossfire of people’s conversation emails—even when we are in the same project team, conversation circle, etc.—it pays to first know at the beginning whether we really want or even needed to participate in the essence of the conversation. Generally speaking, unless specifically addressed and called to answer a specific question, the simplest thing to do is to decide not to read it and any of the subsequent correspondence within the same thread. And thread is the keyword here.
Most modern email clients feature the ability to organize emails so they look like forum message threads. That’s the first and foremost what I personally do. Keeps things easy to quickly eyeball.
Second, we can (single-click) tag or flag emails that at quick glances seem important to revisit later. Forget about creating folders to categorize those emails. It takes more time than we think we have and won’t necessarily work as emails come faster than our ability to move them to the appropriate folder, especially not when today’s email clients have improved search function that can automatically create smart folders to contain the results of our searches. If anything, we’d be better off ignoring emails whose subjects are too generic to be useful as they indicate no forethought about the email itself. If one sender can’t take one minute to write a proper subject line, why must N recipients spend even one minute trying to decide whether it is worth spending more time to read and understand. It simply would be a disservice (not to mention costly in real terms) to our boss and other colleagues who are expecting us to perform our duties timely and productively unhindered by fly-by emails.
Third, also we can a mental note who among our colleagues are frequent offenders so that when email messages come from them, we can make an educated guess the likely importance of those messages and act accordingly.
Lastly, don’t return the favor, i.e., if we don’t like being blindly copied on messages that we think are not important to us then when we do get involved in an email conversation, remove all other recipients names except for the one with whom we are having it. I am a proponent of respecting everyone’s time and summarizing the conclusion of the conversation in a single email and creating a single attachment for the conversation, if we want to inform the team such conversation had taken place only for a matter of historical curiosity.
More often than not, we’ll be appreciated for not being party to exacerbating the condition of everyone else’s information overload. And most importantly, by going through the aforementioned steps regularly and consistently, we build for ourselves a habit to reduce our own being overwhelmed by things we’re unable to decide their importance.
