Effective Email Management — A simple guide

There are many things in our lives that have become accepted norms, even though if you examined it in depth, you’d quickly come to the conclusion that they aren’t really very good at what you want them to do, at least not anymore. Changing them is not very likely or would take a significant amount of time and therefore we are stuck with it. Let me give you some examples. Central Heating, at least the way it works in most homes today, is a really inefficient way of heating a home. Modern technology and innovation could dramatically improve this area but it is unlikely to happen quickly. Why? Because to change old homes over to a completely different system would be expensive and highly disruptive to life. And putting it in new homes is unfamiliar and therefore off putting to people looking to buy. So, given this, there just isn’t the demand at the moment for a better heating system. The electric plug could be another example. Especially outside of countries like the UK which is known to have one of the safest designs in the world. Changing the design and operation of how we get electricity and power into the devices we use isn’t something you can just change. You couldn’t design a new plug that was 300% more effective and safer and put it on the shelves but no-one would buy it. No-one could use it unless they re-wired their home. But how does this relate to effective email management?

Email, is a terrible form of communication in my opinion. Yes it has many benefits to it but in reality, it sits in an odd place on the spectrum of different ways of communicating. It is asynchronous and instantaneous. This is an odd combination. Synchronous communication is where you are communicating with someone in real time. Face to face, on Zoom or on the phone. Asynchronous is where this is not the case. A letter would normally take a couple of days to arrive and then you allow a week or more for a response.

Here is why I don’t like it. With other instantaneous types of communication like text messages, you only tend to use it for quick queries and responses. This works fine. But we tend to use email for anything and everything. We send quick one line emails that are queries or just FYI. This is how we share documents. This is how we communicate important information and news. This is how we hold lengthy back and forth discussions over…