The first step in solving any problem is recognising there is one. If your inbox has hundreds, maybe even thousands of emails in it; if sometimes you feel like you're drowning under emails; if you miss important information sometimes or worse, deadlines; if you sometimes wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning in a cold sweat realising that you never did respond to that student, then perhaps there is a problem. If you don't recognise any of those descriptions then you can save some time and do something more useful than reading the rest of this post.
So much of what we get coming to our email inbox sits at either end of a spectrum: urgent or irrelevant. Taking the latter, if there are things that come that you simply don’t read, can you unsubscribe from them? There’s also a lot to be gained from deleting emails that you know aren’t relevant as soon as they come through (some may be sporadically of interest) as these are often the things that clog up email inboxes.
Regarding the former I would say it is generally student contacts that take priority – so where possible I reply immediately and where not I might send a holding email (so they know I’ve seen it and that I will get back to them).
Everything else then falls into the urgent/important matrix, deal with U&I, U, I and anything which isn’t urgent or important can either be ignored or deleted or left to the set times you may give yourself to deal with email (I tend to look at mine first thing every morning).
Some people are worried about needing to keep emails that they may have to refer to later, so I have folders for things I want to collect (perhaps personal tutoring, modules, research) and I keep a year’s worth of sent emails (so if I don’t have anything to add but I want to keep it I may just reply with Thanks or Okay), which gives me access to email threads.
Approximately once a month I delete up the sent emails to keep them to a year and I empty the deleted folder (you can get recently deleted emails back if necessary).
The summer is probably a good time to weed emails as we tend to get a lot less.
In terms of prioritising
1 Students
2 Meetings (as they only require an accept or decline)
3 Requests for information with a deadline
4 Responses to my requests for information
5 Things I need to do without a deadline (adding these to my outlook calendar)
6 Anything that is purely information giving (if this is for meetings then attachments can be downloaded into a folder) most of which will be deleted immediately
I’m sure most, possibly all of these are things that you have already thought of. It’s a habit for me, with the added bonus of occasionally having an empty inbox and a feeling of smug self-satisfaction.
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