Eight Ways Leaders Can Avoid Email Overload

Email is the bane and blessing of modern communications. It is an extremely efficient form of communication. Each additional email has no incremental cost. You do not have to wait a few days to send or receive emails. Indeed, most leaders would rather have email than not.

But email can also be a time-consuming burden for leaders. I have seen the inbox of some leaders with hundreds of emails. I know those particular leaders are unlikely to get most of those emails handled, some of which could be very important.

One of my research projects this week was on email efficiency for leaders. I read a few dozen articles that offered sagacious insights into effective use of this communications tool.

I also offer my own personal experiences. I receive a voluminous number of emails every day. On most days, I get my inbox to zero. Many of the ideas I gleaned from the research were ideas I was already implementing.

There, of course, is no magic formula for dealing with emails. But I hope these eight summary insights can prove useful to many of you.

Clean your email inbox every day. If an email is worthy of a response, it is worthy of a same-day response. Several email efficiency experts noted that next day email, and those older, rarely get an adequate response, if one at all. Some experts recommend setting aside two to three 30-minute increments to deal with email. I personally look at my inbox as I have time during the day. Delete emails quickly. Some of them, like unsolicited marketing emails need not be opened. All of us receive those forwarded emails with a long string of recipients on it (Have you noticed that a number of them begin with “I don’t usually send emails like this”?). So there are many emails you can delete quickly. That makes your inbox look more manageable. Get an email provider that has a good filter. I am grateful to be in a company that has email filtering that gets rid of 99 percent of the “bad guys” in email. A good email provider, at the very least, will provide some filtering, and it will allow you to mark any email in your inbox as spam. If you have an assistant, use that person wisely with emails. When I first came to my organization six years ago, I had three assistants. Today I have one, and she is the best. She is constantly monitoring my inbox to see what she can handle herself. She has developed her own filtering system for me where key words in an email automatically send that email elsewhere. For example, any email that has the words “invite” or “invitation” goes to my assistant who will check my calendar, get facts on the person requesting, and make recommendations to me. Get emails out of your inbox quickly. If you don’t delete them, forward them to someone else to handle, respond quickly, or place them in a file or folder. Most people will read an email in an inbox repeatedly, a true waste of precious leadership time. Avoid sending negative information by email if possible. Because you can’t read non-verbal clues in an email, they can be misunderstood. If you have negative information to convey, call or tell the recipient in person. Negative emails tend to create a life of their own. I know. I have stupidly sent them on more than one occasion. Avoid email loops. Many leaders will respond well to an email, and the recipient will then respond again with another question. Like some over-talkative people, there are some email writers with just too much time on their hands. It’s okay to bring an email loop to a close after you have responded well the first time. Understand that many emails represent a person who really seeks and deserves a response. It is poor leadership to ignore those types of persons. Those who ignore well-intended senders of emails do so at the risk of hurting themselves and their organizations.

Do you struggle with email? What problems and challenges do you encounter? What email efficiencies have you developed?