Work email

I was reading a Harvard Business Review article on dealing with email overload. Today marks the one-year anniversary of my aggressive campaign to deal with the email tsunami at work. The basic technique is conceptually simple: keep stuff out of the “inbox.” My goal is to have fewer than 20 undealt-with emails by the time I leave for the day.  Since I work with a worldwide customer base, I typically check it between 6:30 and 7:30 in the morning and deal with the most urgent stuff.  A second wave occurs during my commute to work — these are the early risers who get in and are plowing through their pile o’ items.  The third wave of the day occurs between 4 and 6pm.

I pay the most attention to email that:

• has my name in the content, e.g. “Captain Sarcastic, please write biting commentary on El Jefe’s proposal” (I’ll get right on it!)
• has me on the “To:” list with two or fewer other recipients
• is from my boss or Cliff, the CEO
• is from someone I respect
• is brief

With rare exception, I assign lower priority to mail that:

• Contain the word “ASAP.”  “ASAP” is fucking lame and overused.  If it’s truly urgent, provide a very specific time frame.
• are from a senior engineer whom I regard, but is prone to writing multi-page novellas on some technical topic where he wants a decision from an exhaustive list of options he is enumerating.  Bryan, we think highly of you.  Please just present your recommendation with pros and cons.  
• Appears to be an “FYI” mail.   For those of you who label it as such: bless you. I can scan it very quickly before filing it away.
• are massively forwarded threads — these usually get deleted.  Often, if I’m being copied on a series of these threads, I will let the discussion settle down before trying to process the inputs.
• has certain recipients on the to/cc line, e.g., some urban legend-sounding thread (like the “Great American Gas-Out”) where cousin Judy is among the recipients.

I’ve been playing with the rules and flags options in Outlook to help pre-label stuff, but it sorely lacks regular expression processing.  The email I do file away is pushing Outlook’s powers of searching and sorting expediently.