Tips for mastering your InBox

Tips for mastering your InBox

Some e-mail messages are critically important, others much less so.  All of us struggle – every day – to tame a never-ending flow of messages.  How can we better manage the flow?

Over the years, I’ve read several articles about how to master (tame) your InBox.  A recent article that really caught my attention is The 9 Simple Rules Of Email Mastery by Ian Bell.  He’s a Vancouver-based entrepreneur with 13 years’ experience in building and helping technology startups in the U.S. and Canada.

His article offers several thought-provoking tips for better managing your e-mail, including several tips for training your colleagues.  One tip is to train your colleagues to use SMS/ iMessage/BBM instead of e-mail for all urgent communications.  Another is to train them to not CC or BCC you on a mesage because all such messages will be filtered to sub-folders and ignored.

While you may take exception to some of his tips and cringe at his ignorance of IM best practice (he boasts that his archive folder contains every e-mail he’s read since 2000!), he should be commended for recommending you ‘separate church and state’ by never, ever sending e-mails to friends and family from your work account and training them to not send messages to that account either.

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    Sheila Taylor
  • Sheila Taylor is a well known consultant, educator, speaker and writer with more than 25 years of experience in the information management (IM) field.

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