How do you avoid destructive conflict with your email?
Fast Company Published a very good article about handling email differently by Zach Hanlon
A Quick Summary: have only these five e- mail folders:
Inbox – temporary holding place until filed in the other 4
For Today – needs a response by end of day
For this Week
For this Month/Quarter
FYI – If I need to reference again1.
Other tips from me:
-Funnel all nonwork related items to a separate email
-Close down email when you are working on other things
-Pick three times a day to check
What tips do you have?
Develop Power with Grace.
Asking thoughtful questions is one aspect.
The best questions foster understanding, spark innovation, diffuse negative conflict, and build influence –
Spiral Question poses a question semiweekly, Monday and Wednesday.
If you’d like to receive this in e-mail register here.
I’ve been doing this…my learnings after a few days:
1. I feel so empowered when I have few items in my inbox!
2. All the other boxes I had set up had tons of no longer relevent information…a great purge happened here!
3. I set electronic reminders to check end of week, end of month as time goes by quickly and I could see forgetting until it becomes a habit.
4. I also added a separate ‘Quarterly’.
5. I decided not to do a today, as I am going to make sure at the end of the day my inbox is empty.
I’ve created “Not read emails” folder in my Outlook. 🙂
After vacation and during the period of high workload I move all emails there, check the urgent ones and try to schedule 2-3 hours in my calendar to work my not read emails out.
In that way I can keep my inbox (almost) empty…and yes, I feel empowered seing that as well. 🙂