IT Staffing

I was recently out of the office for eight days on a cruise to the Eastern Caribbean.  While out of the office, I did not have access to e-mail and quite frankly, really did not want to have access.   As the owner of an IT consulting company in Cincinnati, I get plenty of e-mail.  I estimate that I get about 70 real e-mails a day.  A lot of these are IT strategy and IT consulting related, our spam service does a pretty good job of eliminating spam.  On Monday morning, my inbox had over 700 unread messages in it.

So today I thought I would talk about strategic ways of dealing with e-mail.  Yes, one way is the delete button.  I know one person that told me they simply delete everything in the inbox and figured that if there was something important there, the sender would eventually let them know.  But rather than delete everything, I like the strategic use of the delete button. 

The first thing is to know about the type of mail that you received.  My e-mail, typically falls into these categories: e-mail from customers or fellow Starbase, Inc. associates, time sensitive newsletters, list-serve messages, and other miscellaneous.  

My e-mail client has the ability to color code messages, so messages from Starbase, Inc. associates and customers are color coded, so I better see them and not accidently delete them.  I typically look at these first.  

The biggest key to effectively dealing with a lot of email is to group the messages into blocks.  To help group these messages together, I sort my inbox various ways.  Sorting by sender helps me delete mail very quickly from senders that I don’t care to read.   Sorting by subject, helps me deal with the list serve messages.  If there is a subject that I don’t care to read, I can deal with those messages in a block as well.

Once I have eliminated the messages I don’t care to open, I can more effectively deal with the remaining messages.