How many emails in your work email inbox?

[Sum Dum Gai]

So those of you with hundreds, or thousands of emails - do you not organize them into folders? Is everything needing a followup? That would unnerve me to just leave emails there - I would feel like I am missing something.

Most of what I get are informational emails. It's somebody else in the group letting all of us know that they're going to be patching certain systems on Wednesday at 3 or something like that. So we all know not to worry if said person forgets to turn off the monitoring scripts and we get emails when the system goes down. They don't require a response, and it's not worth organizing them because the email becomes worthless on Wednesday at 3:30, or whenever I get another email from that person saying they're done. We have people all over the country all working on the same project, so we need a way to keep each other in the loop, however there are surprisingly few actual conversations going on. It's mostly FYI type stuff that's only important for a few days or weeks.

[NomoreDramaQ1015]

Most of what I get does not need a follow-up, a lot of times lately it is someone looking for some chemical or it is a general annoucement to the entire college that doesn't require a response or an automated message telling me that my request for leave has been sent, then another email saying it has been approved. . .

[tcu2003]

Jun 7, 2011 12:49:21 GMT -5 moneymaven said:

So those of you with hundreds, or thousands of emails - do you not organize them into folders? Is everything needing a followup? That would unnerve me to just leave emails there - I would feel like I am missing something.

I have a chunk of different emails that aren't project-specific, or don't fit in any categories, so those are usually the ones that end up sitting in my inbox. Or soemtimes I have project specific emails that I want to be able to reference quickly, so I leave them in my inbox so I can search for them easier than going to the project folder. If it's something that I need to follow up with and haven't yet, I either mark it as unread, or put it as a to-do task in Outlook.

[schildi]

I've sent 3,463 emails (work only) in the last 9 months and 10 days. That's about 20 per day.

[cme1201]

71 sitting in my inbox, all have been read.

[midjd]

This thread makes me wonder what workers ever did before email

[cubefarmer]

We don't do hard copy letters anymore. We are totally paperless, so email is instead of regular mail. Also since we want everything in writing, email also is instead of phone conversations. I can go a whole week without one phone call. We don't have file cabinets since we don't have paper anymore, so everything is stored on the system. I get a lot more work done every day than I did before personal computers. If the computer goes down, well, then, it's break time.

[spartan7886]

I have also been known to leave things in my inbox so I can still access the attachment and reply on my Blackberry. If you file it then try to do either of those things, the BB gets mad.

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

I get less email now with social networking like fb, twitter, and text for the trivial and/or short and sweet communications. For the rest, I filter everything off. I have no 'general' inbox. If you're in the general inbox you're never- and I mean NEVER going to hear back from me. And I pretty much let people know that. I also have different email accounts for different things. I have a "junk" account at yahoo I use when I have to enter an email address someplace.

I also- have an email policy now. You can find that by searching for articles on emails on www.fourhourworkweek.com

[moneymaven]

Paul - I am obsessed with 4 Hour Work Week.

[Elizabeth]

Jun 7, 2011 22:47:55 GMT -5 cubefarmer said:

We don't do hard copy letters anymore. We are totally paperless, so email is instead of regular mail. Also since we want everything in writing, email also is instead of phone conversations. I can go a whole week without one phone call. We don't have file cabinets since we don't have paper anymore, so everything is stored on the system. I get a lot more work done every day than I did before personal computers. If the computer goes down, well, then, it's break time.

It's so true about the amount of phone calls decreasing. If I am on an e-mail exchange and it's getting too wordy, I will just pick up the phone and call that person, then follow up with a brief recap saying, "As per our discussion..." I do like to have a paper trail of my interactions because there are some "bus drivers" here in the office, but the main reason is that I am a visual person and remember things better when I read them. I have a few old school collegues who like to do business by phone. I have told them repeatedly that I forget to return phone calls but they don't listen, so sometimes have to keep calling me until they actually get me on the line. But if you e-mail me I will respond within the hour.

[KaraBoo]

For those questioning what to do with emails that aren't specific to any of your projects, here's what I do:

I have a folder specifically set up for all of the 'informative' emails I get from my company. These are the emails talking about such-n-such department was featured in this news blog/cast/paper, or "let's welcome these new employees", or "Come join us for free desert to celebrate xx", or "such-n-such server is going to be down at midnight, make sure you're logged out of the system" (not something that pertains to me!).

Outlook has a "rules" feature that I use to automatically send emails like these to a folder labeled "Company News". These are things I want to reference at some point, but not have cluttering up my in-box. Then, when I have a few free minutes, I'll go through the folder to see if there's anything that directly pertains to me or just so I'm up on company business.

If I didn't do this, I'd have 5-20 emails added to my inbox every day cluttering up space.