You get two tips for the price of one this week, both on the topic of effectively and productively managing email replies:
1. get your reply tasks out of email and
2. be frugal with your email replies.
The first tip: get to-reply tasks out of your email and into your task management system, wherever that may be. Chris Busse offered this suggestion in reply to our Cranking through Gmail post from yesterday:
I generally agree with all of these except the “@reply” tip — I was doing pretty much the same thing and found it way too easy to take an “out of site, out of mind” attitude toward them after they were archived with that tag. Often times I’d pull up that tag and be overwhelmed by how many things needed replying.
Now I will forward these emails to Highrise and/or task them as needing a reply or other type of follow up. Since the emails are now on the same task list as the other things I need to get done, I don’t forget about them and I assign them the proper priority and context with everything else I need to do.
That’s great advice. Most of us use our email accounts as to do lists, but there are distinct benefits to moving task management out of your email. As Chris points out, we are more likely to look at our actual to do lists than at folders or tagged messages inside of email, and our to do systems may support prioritization and context not available within email.
Also, taking a step between receiving an email and labeling it with to-reply or some such allows us to stop and think: Do I really need to reply to this? Can I handle this other than by email? Or can I just let it go entirely? Which leads to our second tip of the week…
Be frugal with email replies.
This tip comes from Robert Scoble via Tim Ferriss. In an interview about how he handles his huge email load, Robert told Tim that each email reply he makes generates on average 1.5 to 2 additional email responses. The more you reply to email, the more you’ll get back.
So instead of automatically replying to an email think to yourself: Can I handle this through some other channel (a quick IM, a Twitter, when I see this person)? Can I delay replying, and perhaps allow the issue addressed in the email to resolve itself in some way? Or can I let it go entirely, just archive it and be done with it? Email has a way of demanding our attention and our replies; don’t let it enslave you.
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