Email is brilliant, it provides near instant communication and is a daily fact of our modern lives.  It’s hard to think of the days before the invention of email and how the world did business prior to it. However, at the same time, it can be such a burden to manage.

I started at my company as a senior website developer 18 months ago and in the last 7 months have moved to being web manager and now senior manager leading I.T.  My responsibilities have increased significantly, and so has my emails… my lack of email management and organisation really hurts my productivity line.

I recently read that emails take one quarters of a workers day reading and replying to email.  I was initially surprised by this fact, then thought about my own email usage – it’s probably right on target, it could even be that I spend even more than a 25%  of my time in my emails.

I’m questioning myself what can be done to improve my email habits, how can I use my time more efficiently?  Over the years I have read article suggesting to set specific times to read & respond to your emails, don’t have your email client open all day, make use of email labels, set email rules etc.

While I do do some of these already, I do find I get lazy.  I did have once a number of email rules, then changing computers reset all my setup rules forcing you to redo all the hard work over again.

One question I have is, why is there not a perfect email client?  Email clients, or the protocoles surrounding email have not changed much over the years.  The only major industry features adopted by most clients is gmail’s labels or tagging system instead of sorting into folders and email threading (which I personally find most clients implementation annoying) – thats was what? over 10 years ago that both these features became popular?

My perfect email client I would like to see is one that was actually fast, had an efficient search engine (very few actually do), had learning capabilities and some basic AI regarding content and context of a email message, learn your reply habits, understand your contacts and group emails.  Your email client should be able to work as your assistant, automatically creating it’s own rules for labelling and putting emails in front of you that are important and put aside emails that are least important.  Email shouldn’t be something you need an assistant for, it should be the assistant.

I am nearly silly enough to start a personal project on the above, although, I know I would never be able to get it past a certain stage on my own and would require a fairly moderately sized team to gain any momentum and push it forward.  I’m sure this is already being thought of and actively explored by the likes of Google and Microsoft.

Coming back to today – what can I do to manage my email.  I’ve been reading up about a number of tips, the below list are what i have decided to try this week.

• Delete first – delete notifications that are unlikely to require action.
• End the week on a zero inbox,
• Have nothing in my inbox older than 2 days
• Unsubscribe to all news letters (And avoid distribution lists)
• Setup email rules to filter out what I can