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.
