You may be interested in a BBC TV program on tomorrow evening (5th October ‘09), “email is ruining my life” on BBC4 at 9:30pm.

Libby Potter investigates whether e-mail helps or hinders workplace performance, and shows how to control it rather than letting it control us.

Is your inbox out of control? Is your day managed through reaction to the next email received? Do you wish you could come back from holiday to less than ten emails?

Who said No? Can I please swap places with you?

I totally agree with the BBC programs synopsis, email is out of control. There’s far too much about. But you can’t just sit and complain, you really need to keep on top of it. Especially if you use Outlook and Exchange (if you’re using the former at work, you’re probably using the later also).

Why?

Firstly large numbers on items in your inbox, calendars etc = POOR performance.**

I usually recommend no more than about 2500 – 5000 messages in any of the critical path folders.  The critical path folders are the Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, and Sent Item folder. Ideally, keep the Inbox, Contacts and Calendar to 1000 or less. This from a blog post on The Microsoft Exchange Team blog.

Secondly, if you’re a lawyer then you really should be looking after the electronic file in the same way you do a paper file. Keeping an organised inbox can help with this.

So here’s my top 5 tips on how to tackle the ever increasing deluge of email:

1. Deal with it immediately. If the email is a simple question or can be dealt with in <5secs then do it, then immediately delete or file it. For anything else move to step 2!
2. Use sub folders and file incoming email immediately. Create sub folders for matters, projects or non matter groupings. Then file the incoming email on receipt. You can always use an Outlook search to read unread emails across all these sub folders. This way you keep your inbox item count low.
3. Get into the habit of cleaning out your calendar regularly. Either go into your calendar and delete old items once a month or create an “Archive Calendar” and move your old appointments into it (that is if you really want to refer to what you were doing on 7th September 2004!)
4. Get rid of junk mail. You may be lucky and be in a firm that uses a good spam filter already (if not take a look around at the personal spam filters available – I quite like SpamFighter). But in addition unsubscribe from all those vendor emails, news lists etc emails to cut down the noise coming into your inbox.
5. Finally, Archive! Get rid of large volumes of old email by archiving it. If your firm has a document management system that you can file emails to, then file them (if you’ve used step 2 this should be easier). Your firm may also have an enterprise archiving tool, get your emails in that and out of your inbox! If neither of these, then simply archive to a PST (then burn the PST to DVD and remember, only attach it to Outlook when required!).

If you’ve got any other killer tips for keeping the email volume down, then put them in the comments.

And finally, take a look at this YouTube video that introduces Google Wave. Google Wave is Google’s attempt to look at email/electronic communication from a fresh perspective.  Maybe one day email will be truly a thing of the past!

** this point is for Exchange 2003, which is still the most widespread version in corporate IT