A few years ago I took a course that made a big impact on my time management. It's from The Effective Edge and is based on the David Allen book Getting Things Done. One of the keys of the course was setting aside time to process incoming mail and do it/delete/delege/defer it. The course had great hands on advice for using Tasks in Outlook to manage follow-ups.
When I worked at Dell I thought I recieved a lot of email. Since I moved to Microsoft I can confidently say no other organization on the planet generates more email. It's as if every day Softies get up determined to stress test Exchange. There are dozens of people on To: lines and multiple dozens on CC. We have thousands of distribution lists and most people are added (often without asking) to dozens of them. As a culture we are very inefficient at how we use email.
So how do you process your mail when it just keeps coming? I started using this Do Not Disturb feature which _stops mail from coming in_ while you process what is already there. Yes I know there are other workarounds, but when I click the Do Not Disturb button I feel free! The Prioritizer feature also looks for keywords and reporting relationships to flag the most important emails. It is actually quite effective, so much so I stopped using other complex rules I created to filter notes based on priority.
Download it free here from Office Labs.
