How to Avoid an Inbox Overflow When You Return From the Holidays
Some of you are probably just getting out of the Thanksgiving weekend email avalanche. In just a few weeks, we’ll hit the last holiday wormhole of the year, and on January 2, we’ll have to wade back through the piles of unread messages. Here are some tips to help make your return to work and email a little less. painful.
Fast Company spoke with author Alexandra Samuel, who literally wrote a book on the subject ( Work Smarter, Rule Your Email ), and Dmitry Leonov, VP of Email Management at Sanebox. Their advice on how to manage your email while on vacation without having to constantly log onto your computer is extremely helpful. Since you are definitely busy and important, but not so busy and important, you shouldn’t take the time to relax and have an eggog with your kids.
Lie!
Samuel offers a diplomatic answering machine that invites people who urgently need email to write to you again on the day of your return. Leoniev invites you to tell them that you will be back to work a few days after you actually do:
“This will give you time to get back to the office and get busy,” he says. “Plus, everyone will be very impressed when you return to them on your return day. It’s all about creating expectations. “
And if you’re really brave, you could theoretically delete everything you got over the break – anyone who says something important will email it again.
Help yourself and don’t send emails
Both Leoniev and Samuel suggested that people resist the urge to attack the to-do list before the vacation and just. Stop. Sending. Emails. Take yourself at least a 72-hour break from unnecessary dates before taking a break. Either way, you won’t want to deal with a response, especially if it’s an email to your boss and he suddenly wants to chat.
Filter, filter, filter
You can filter out things like newsletters and other daily spam with most email systems, and you can also prioritize certain messages from certain people (like customers who pay for your vacation). It might even be worth creating a “vacation email account” that receives forwards from important people in your main inbox so you can see at a glance if they are contacting you. Which brings us to this point:
Um, check your email
Leonev says that if you take five minutes every other day to simply delete bulk messages from Sephora or whatever, you will save a lot of time later. He also advocates just being quick to respond to anything that can be quickly resolved. Go ahead, the answer is “yes” or “no”, everything that completes the correspondence, but does not renew it.
“When you reply, think one step ahead to answer any other questions that might trigger another email,” Leonov says.
Good luck with Zero Mailbox, and don’t forget to look up from your phone when the ball hits!