Too many Mails?

You know that. Starting the day and again tens and hundret of unread and new mails. Just being out of office for two days causes an un-managable amount of mails. Don't speak about coming back from holiday.

We need some helping rules to deal with it.

The most important target-achievement-ability is to be consquent. The rest is luck and a good sense to avoid missing something.

To be able to achive something in the day we have to be consequent in managing our mails.

There is some support by my SPAM filter and I also select quite instinctive by reading just the headlines. But I don't have that much time to select instinctive and work with the mails along the incoming time.

I just follow 3 rules. Since 8 years I use this rules consequently. Last year I had approx. 5.000 unread business mails without spam, advertising etc. And nothing happened. Still successful :)

My best decision was to build up my own Priority Pyramid. Along this priorities I have automatic filter. Even in holiday, just concentrating on the upper head of the pyramid I didn't miss any important mail until today.

The most important input is to know which people are important to me. Just look on my article to get an impression of stakeholders and value contribution. If you know to whom you give a contribution you know pretty well your stakeholders.

How to use the pyramid? Easy! The upper head get my full attention. If I did read all mails from them I pay attention to the next level below. And so on. If time is over, bad luck for the rest of the mail writers. Please remember, if it is important they will contact you again. And if they have real pain, they call you of visit you.