The First 2 Hours by Donna McGeorge

Author:Donna McGeorge [McGeorge, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-11-19T13:26:56+00:00

How to scan your email

In his book Smart Work, Dermot Crowley has some great advice for handling email. He explains there are three types of email:

Action

Information

Junk.

In the first two hours of your day, you should only be handling the Action emails: those that require some kind of response or action from you. Information and Junk should be cast aside to be reviewed at a low-intensity time of day.

So the new habit I want you to get into is to scan your email first thing in the morning and make some conscious decisions about what requires action, and when. For the most part, you will be handling the bulk of your email later in the day. Follow these five steps:

Run down the inbox and identify the 10 per cent that require a considered response. (Colour-code senders so you can quickly identify those from your boss!)

Determine if those responses are needed immediately or can be scheduled.

If it’s not urgent, and it requires a considered response, then schedule it for the first two hours tomorrow, or another morning later in the week.

Leave the rest until later in the day (more on that in chapter 5).

Get rid of stuff that has already been handled or is old. This is another task to leave until later in the day. One of the biggest factors in creating overwhelm at work is seeing the number of emails in your inbox, irrespective of whether you have read them or not. These days the search capability in email is very good. My suggestion is that you only need one additional folder in your inbox, titled ‘Done’. Once an email has been read or actioned, you can drag it across. If you need it in the future, provided you remember whom it was from and a rough idea of the subject line and date, you will be able to find it.

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