Back to Work - do I manage my emails or do they manage me?

I was back in work this morning after precisely 7.5 working days out of the office.  I've recently been promoted and so am now the happy recipient of a Blackberry which I have to say really does help me manage my emails on a day to day basis.

I don't think I'm a particularly important person, but I do receive an infeasibly large amount of emails on a daily basis - an estimate would be c100 - 200.  A lot of these are emails that I'm cc'ed into and can delete more or less immediately, but a fair few more require a response or for me to make a note of the information that they contain.  

To make sure that my workload was covered whilst I was in Pefkos, I forwarded my emails to one of my colleagues and set up my out of office to do this.  For some reason it didn't work immediately so I also created a rule which still didn't work and then our IT Support function set up a divert at their end.  This ended up in at one point my poor suffering colleague receiving each of my emails 3 times over!  Eventually this was rectified, but she breathed a huge sigh of relief when I walked back into the office this morning "I don't know how you do it!" she exclaimed.  

Perhaps I'm being hard on myself, but I think my email management leaves a lot of room for improvement.  I have fairly bad hoarding tendencies (although not as bad as Richard Wallace - I watched the update on his story yesterday and yes I will be doing more de-cluttering and a car boot sale this weekend!) and I think this feeds into my treatment of emails.  Despite having an amazing (and slightly scary) archive manager which essentially means any email I've ever received or sent since I joined my company in 2008 is retrievable within seconds, I am a bit of an email hoarder and I won't delete or move anything out of my inbox until I've dealt with it.  I set myself targets of having no more than 20 emails in my inbox at any point in time, but probably the best I've managed recently has been about 40.  I tell myself that there must be a better way to manage emails, but I'm yet to have found an easy to implement solution - so I've just run a quick Google search for inspiration and come up with a couple of articles.

This article from Leadership and Community has a few quick and easy suggestions such as:

• Turn off the new mail alert indicator (Quick and Easy but a Big Impact) - I've pretty much done this - at least I've turned off the profile view of the email, maybe something I should revisit?
• Check your email only 3 times a day - nice idea, but I work in recruitment - if I only check 3 times and I am even a few minutes behind seeing an email from a client with a job that hasn't just gone to me, but also my competitors, I'm going to be at a massive disadvantage - not practical for me.
• Empty your inbox at least once a day - Now this one *is* a good idea, I think that what my strategy will be over the next week will be to clear my emails from that day and make sure that I'm making a solid dent in the ones that have been lurking for a bit too long and that have accumulated over my holidays.

This article from Dumb Little Man (!)  has a few more suggestions, although very similar vein of thought as the previous article, although I did like 

Delete Ruthlessly: You can easily conclude from the subject line of an email if it's worth reading. If it isn't, delete it without thinking twice. If you slack, thinking that you probably might read it later, then believe me, that email will remain there as unread until you finally decide to do away with it. Act upon the email the first time you see it by either responding immediately, deleting it, or setting it as a task to accomplish at a specific time.

What is quite interesting is that whilst there are a lot of articles about email management, they all focus more on the technical management, rather than addressing some of the underlying issues which would help people a lot more with time management and work in general.  Here are a few ideas that I've found useful:

• If you get an email from a colleague - pick up the phone or walk over to them and talk to them, more often a 2 minute phone call/conversation will resolve a query quicker than several back and forth emails.  Also this is much better for building your internal networks.  
• However, if like me you end up being a bit too helpful at times to the detriment of your own work here is another useful tip - if you get a question emailed from a colleague that you know there is an answer they could find from another source i.e. the intranet, a web search or even asking someone else - delay your response by 30 minutes or so (unless it's clearly critically urgent!) and fire a quick reply along the lines of "Sorry, just read your email, do you still need my help?"  There is a good chance they've already found their own answer.
• I need to read a lot of industry related newsletters to keep up to date with what is going on in my sector, I subscribe to a lot and they don't always arrive at sensible times to read, so you can either - dedicate a specific time i.e. lunch or at a quieter moment of the day to read them all or forward them onto a specific folder or different email address for reading at home.  You can also set up automatic rules to manage these types of emails so that they don't even distract you in your inbox.
• Email is very immediate - in days gone by you would receive all your post in the morning and have to prioritise which pieces to respond to first, email comes when it comes and often we feel compelled to answer it, even though there may be other things that are more deserving our our attention.  I try and apply the Urgent & Important Matrix theory  (although again I'm often drawn into the trap of considering email as "urgent an important" when actually it's probably less urgent than I initially think)  (This matrix is from JISC Infonet although I'm not sure where the original idea is from.)

Of course one other school of thought is the One Touch rule, but I just don't think I can be that ruthless - does this actually work for anyone?

If anyone has any other secrets that they'd like to share that will help me - I'd be very pleased if you can let me know any "magic bullets" of email time management.

So all of this is very grown up, so to wrap up, here is a picture of one of the gorgeous cats that I met in Rhodes Old Town (It ate some cheese that my mother-in-law fed him earlier in the day.)  A Greek cat post will likely follow at some point later this week...