Email Study

Recently I conducted a small study on the average number of emails the MFI receives a day. More than half of those polled received between 51-100 emails a day. Some were higher and some lower. To have to juggle that many emails can be quite a feat.

Here is the question. Excluding spam of course, do you respond to all of those emails? Do you have a process in your mind or a company policy that dictates whether or not you will respond and when?

Looking forward to your feedback.

I try to reserve a few minutes per hour to review and respond to email; unless it is something I am waiting for. If I receive something I am specifically waiting for; I respond to it right away if I can. I try to keep this to the first 10 or 15 minutes of each hour per day. Monday mornings are usually pretty rough and I take about the first 30 minutes in the morning. I also reserve the last 30 minutes of Friday afternoon for the same thing so I can leave a clean inbox.

Microsoft Outlook is my best friend. I have rules set up to push messages that are newsletters, MFI replies, new Twitter follows, facebook messages, etc. into specific folders. This allows me to focus on messages that more critically directed to me and not have to filter through as much in my inbox. When I get the free time to flip through the other folders I of course do so and reply when I can. It's tough to juggle, and with multiple email accounts it sometimes complicates things as well.

It will be interesting to see how Google Wave impacts email.

Thanks Mark,
I have similar filters set up for Gmail. That way I can focus my time on one set up of email response projects at a time. Instead of having the email go to my inbox, I have them filtered to go to their own folder. So an example may be emails from staff members could me one folder, emails from regular vendors, emails from social media networks etc.

Thanks for your response. Anyone else have suggestions on how they handle appropriate responses to their email inbox?

My alternative email includes mostly of the notifications from Facebook and Friendster, pretty useless I must say. Of course when I am waiting for an email that is very important, I click on it right away, read and reply. But the ones that are of no value, I trash 'em.

Creating filter in Google mail has been a great help. I used outlook before and had rules but it was not as friendly because it actually moved the e-mail whereas in Google the e-mail has a colored tag that identifies a group.
I also have changed dome of the settings in the blogs to not always get everything.