Tips for Managing Your Email

Thanks to its partnership with publisher Eye on Education, EducationWorld is pleased to present this administrator advice from Get Organized!: Time Management for School Leaders by Frank Buck.

The start of each new school year brings plans for the months ahead. It also increases the amount of email all educators receive on a monthly basis. School leaders, adopt these healthy email habits for yourself, and share them with your teachers!

Is email a great time management tool or a great time sink? In little more than a decade, it moved from being a rare novelty to being commonplace. We all love it, because it is easy to send a message to one person or to hundreds of people all with a single mouse click. We hate it because our email inbox explodes with advertisements, jokes and a host of other low-priority items. We stress about it because we also get good information and do not know exactly what to do with it. Below are eight tricks on how to send, receive and manage those ever-lasting email messages.

Check email only at designated points in the day.  Email becomes an interruption and a time-waster when we check it constantly throughout the day.

Handle all email in one group.  Go from the top of the list and do not stop until you reach the bottom. Make a decision about each email. Act on the emails which require action, or at least add items to your task list describing what needs to be done. Respond to those which simply need a response. Forward that which needs to be forwarded. File what needs to be filed. Delete what needs to be deleted. When you get to the bottom of the list, the Inbox should be empty.

Delay checking email until mid-morning.  Begin the day with the tasks you had planned to begin your day. Once the day is shaping up as planned, you are likely to handle email quickly and get back to working through your task list. If you begin the day with email, you may well get so wrapped up in reading and responding that the day gets away with little actually being accomplished.  

Create subject lines that are descriptive of the message.  The person who receives your email will be able to tell a great deal about the contents without even opening it. While a subject line saying “Meeting” would convey little, a subject line saying “Staff meeting October 23 at 9:00 in the Board Room” gives the receiver a much clearer picture of the nature and importance of the message. At times, the entire message can be put in the subject line. “Your leave request was approved,” “The figures you needed are attached” and “Can you meet with me Friday at 2:00?” are examples of how one can convey the entire message in the subject line.

Keep messages short.  If at all possible, limit the message to one screen of text. If the message runs longer than that, look to see if perhaps several different subjects are being covered in the same message. If so, consider breaking the email into several short messages, each handling a different subject.

Front-load the message.  Begin by giving the reader an idea of what he will need to do about your message. Include the most important information towards the beginning of the message. Let the lesser important details bring up the tail end.

Save time by creating a signature line.  The signature line can include anything you like. Typically, your name, title, organization, address, telephone, fax and email address are good information to include. The signature line is to the email what letterhead is to written correspondence. Consulting the “Help” section of any email program provides instruction on how to create a signature in that program.

Avoid printing email messages.  The advantage of digital data is the ease with which it can be stored, searched, retrieved, shared or edited. When you print digital data, all of these advantages are negated. People often print email because they are simply used to handling paper. Old habits can be hard to break.

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