Work Smarter, Rule Your Email

1

Stemming the Email Tide with Rules and Filters

When your inbox contains only a day or two’s worth of unanswered messages, the pace of email seems manageable, and there’s some breathing room in your day. When your inbox is a backlogged chaos of unfinished tasks and unanswerable requests, not only is your email daunting, your whole work life can feel out of control because every spare moment is spent trying to file, catch up on, or respond to the messages that await. Perhaps more important, you spend more time sorting through back emails than you can hope to spend answering the important current ones.

To improve the situation, let’s rethink exactly what we mean by an “inbox.” For most of us, our email inbox is the place where all our messages come ...