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I came across a nice article from Dawn Foster at GigaOm with some practical tips to save yourself from the perpetual problem of information overload. They are as follows: Unsubscribe. OK so you were foolish enough to subscribe for publications you are never going to read anyway. Well, be intelligent now. Make the effort to unsubscribe from all the newsletters you should never have signed up for in the first place, and save your inbox a whole lot of clutter. Use your unsubscribe power for unsolicited emails as well. Turn off or filter the bacn. Bacn refers to notifications from social networks or other places that you never really check. Not quite spam, but not useful either. Filter them out to a folder you might check once a year, or, once a lifetime. Use RSS. Why burden your inbox when you can get information through RSS feeds? Aggressively archive into folders. Use the light inbox strategy, as soon as a mail is older than a few weeks, it is stale in email terms. Archive away all old emails in folders, and keep your inbox sprightly and happy. Use filters and rules. My favorite. Filters and rules go a long way to keep you organized. Rather than all being thrown into a huge common repository, you know exactly where to find specific categories of emails. You may even want to create folders in terms of priority. Color-code. Within folders, color coding gives you a quick bird's eye view of different types of emails. Consider inbox zero. Although achieving a zero inbox will be impossible at most times, even aiming for it will save you a lot of clutter. Get tasks onto a to-do list. Tasks should never be assigned through email anyway. Well, anyway, if they are, time to put them on your to do list. You will notice you are missing and forgetting about less tasks, and more organized overall. Batch process. If you try to keep up with your email all day you will never get any work done. So desi gnate certain times of the day, and check and reply to all those emails in that period.And stick to it! Send less. Simple policy. The less emails you send, the less emails you will get. So don't just email like crazy. Move to collaboration software.  This is my own. We tend to perform many tasks through business email, that are simply done better through collaboration software - document collaboration, task delegation, discussions, meeting coordination etc.Â
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