Even the best email-filtering system can’t rescue you from email altogether. At some point you’re going to have to read and reply to at least some of your messages. How you go about processing the email that hits your inbox depends on your resources, your work, and your work style.

Daily Triage

Once you have email rules and filters that scale the volume of messages in your inbox to the time you’ve committed to managing email, your daily (or hourly) email check-ins won’t be such a chore. Still, here are some processes and tricks that can ensure you’ll be able to spend time on the messages that matter most.

• Read only when you can reply. One of my colleagues is religious about checking his email only when he has time to both read and reply to his messages. That’s not realistic for me. I need to do frequent, quick scans throughout the day so I don’t miss time-sensitive messages. But his discipline has informed my workflow. If I read a message on my phone but don’t have time to reply to it, I flag it or set it back to “unread” so that I know to review it during my next scheduled email hour.
• Prioritize bottlenecks. When you’re doing a quick scan through your inbox, prioritize any message or request where you are the bottleneck. If one or two minutes of your time can provide your colleague with the answer or resource she needs to move forward on her project, your timely attention has a direct impact on the overall efficiency of your company or team.
• Draft prefab replies. It’s worth your time to come up with standard replies to the types of emails you receive regularly, such as client requests for information on your products and services, media inquiries, or requests for your bio. Save these as signatures in your email client (which will make them available under your “signatures” drop-down menu) or, if you are a Gmail user, as “canned responses” (enable this feature under Labs, and find out how to use it here).

FROM A USER: I use Gmail as my email application, and there is one tool that I couldn’t live without now: the canned response feature. I try to automate procedures as much as possible, and the canned response tool is a way of setting up email templates so I don’t have to type the same thing over and over again, therefore saving quite a bit of time.—Sharon Sheppard, OutofhoursAdmin

FROM A USER: I check email daily using the Email Game [from Baydin]. The game allows you to focus on your messages one at a time, apply the appropriate action to the message, and quickly move along. Also, you get points!—Lo Marino, Customer and Office Happiness Liaison, Baydin

Converting Emails into Tasks

One of the biggest contributors to inbox overflow is the tendency to treat your inbox as a to-do list, holding onto any email that contains an implicit or explicit task so that you won’t forget about it. While holding onto those emails is a great idea, leaving them in the inbox can lead to your inbox getting out of hand—and to forgetting to take care of the task itself. Make sure you’re reserving your inbox for actual communications only, and not using it as a task list. That way you’ll have a much easier time keeping it manageable.

Of course, to do that you’ll need a way to capture your email tasks in whatever software (or paper!) you use to keep track of your to-dos. For emails that require a reply, create a separate folder and move messages there (and remember to check it). (David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology would instruct you to draft an immediate reply whenever you can do that in two minutes or less, but I don’t always find this realistic.) Many other emails contain implicit or explicit tasks that are distinct from (though they may also be necessary for) replying to the message. Instead of leaving these emails in your inbox, take the time to add them to your actual to-do list, and file the emails for reference once you are actually able to do the task.

Here are some tools and tricks that can help you convert three types of email task.

• Use your email tool’s task manager. If you use Outlook for both email and task management, it’s pretty easy to convert an email to a task on either Windows or a Mac. Gmail users who need only a basic task manager can use the service’s native task manager or a third-party tool like Taskforce.
• Create tasks via email. You don’t have to limit yourself to using whatever task manager happens to be built into your preferred email tool. Just about all of the leading task-management tools offer you a way of adding tasks via email. Many also offer scripts or plug-ins that let you select a chunk of text from within an email and convert it into a task.
• Set up email-free reminders. Some of the tasks in your inbox may be ones you sent there yourself. Even I’m guilty of occasionally sending myself an email like “Remember to call the plumber.” But this really is a bad habit. Instead, find a way to give yourself reminders that have nothing to do with your email—whether it be your iPhone’s built-in reminders system (“Siri, remind me to call the plumber tomorrow at eleven”) or another mobile task manager.
• Recognize tasks. One of the reasons email piles up is that it can be tricky to distinguish between processing your email and doing your work. You’re “just checking your email,” and the next thing you know, you’re deep in the bowels of an Excel file, calculating the latest budget figures so that you can reply to a message from your boss. But the more you can separate the job of reading and replying to email from the tasks that are sometimes embedded in your correspondence, the faster you’ll be able to get through your inbox and actually get on to those tasks with a (metaphorical) clean desk. A good rule is that you should stay within your email program during email time. Anything that requires you to open a browser or Word document, pick up the phone, or walk over to a colleague’s desk is by definition a discrete task.

Even with these tips and tricks, you may not always get through all the email you intend to. That’s why you also need a strategy for handling the backlog.

Handling a Backlog

If you’re like me, good intentions and daily email processing can’t prevent a gradual accumulation of emails in your inbox. Your backlog may even be the reason you picked up this book. The good news is that a backlog is a great opportunity to fine-tune your mail rules, much the way you use the pile of messages in your inbox to figure out which rules you need in the first place. Using rules speeds up the process of archiving or deleting your way through the lion’s share of your backlog, and reduces the likelihood and scale of future backlogging.

FROM A USER: Once you’ve built up a larger queue of email, inbox zero becomes as realistic as not having any files at all: just a way to beat oneself up. What one needs is a way to process more-recent mails and treat the rest of the queue as storage.—Naunihal Singh, Professor, Air War College

Start by sorting your inbox by the “from” or “subject” field, so you are looking at related messages. For each group of messages—or each individual message—ask yourself: Should this have gone to an alternate inbox or a reference or list folder in the first place, or should it have been deleted immediately? If so, create a rule to send future similar messages to their rightful destination. Keep a careful eye on your message count as you go through this process. If you’ve got hundreds of messages, each new rule you create should reduce your message count by a handful if not a dozen. That way you’ll know you’re creating rules that will actually be relevant to a critical mass of messages. While you’re reviewing your older messages and setting up rules to deal with them, resist the urge to hit “reply.” First set up rules to thin the pile and then tackle individual messages. But make sure to leave a few hours at the end of your rule-making marathon to review the individual messages you actually need to read and address, or you’ll simply end up with another backlog.

FROM A USER: When you come back from a vacation and tackle your accumulated email, always start with the most recent one. Most of the earlier stuff has already been dealt with, so you can save a lot of time by working backwards through the file.—Deborah Hobson, Professor Emerita, York University (and also my mother—and mom filter survivor)

If you’re dealing with a really extreme backlog—hundreds or thousands of unread messages—you may need to cut your losses at a certain point and drag messages older than 30 or 60 days to an archive folder. The quickest way to reduce a backlogged inbox from hundreds to dozens of messages (or from thousands to hundreds of messages, if that’s the scale of your backlog) is to choose a cut-off date: Anything older than X days simply doesn’t get reviewed.

TIP: File faster with a catchall “archive” folder. If you like to keep your email archives organized by project, topic, or client, you’ll need to set up rules that file your read messages into the appropriate folders. But if you’re happy for all your read messages to land in either the trash or a single “archive” folder, you can make one rule that applies to all read messages older than X days.

Once you’ve made rules to deal with the bulk of your messages, you should be looking at a much thinner pile: just those messages that you did want to see in your inbox in the first place, and which couldn’t be automatically filed or deleted once read. Process these as you would do your daily email triage. While it’s okay to leave a handful of messages in your inbox (just as you might leave them at the end of a business day), be wary of leaving any of those older, starred messages behind. If they’ve been there for more than a few days and you’re still not ready to address them, move them to the alternate inboxes you’ve set up for “follow up” or “replies needed.”

While this rules-based approach is the best way to tackle a backlog so that it doesn’t grow back, you may occasionally choose to resort to emergency measures. There are very few circumstances in which I recommend such approaches, since they don’t do anything to prevent a backlog in the future, and they come with some obvious risks. But if you’re changing jobs, taking a sabbatical, hiring an assistant, or making some other major change that will affect what kind of email you receive or how you manage it, emergency measures may make sense. Here are some options to consider, in ascending order of severity:

• Better vacation messages. Create an out-of-office message that spares you from the job of processing a backlog upon your return, such as “I am on vacation until August 5th and will not be checking email. I will try to review my email upon my return, but if your message requires a response, please resend it after August 5th.”
• Email vacations. Use auto reply to put incoming messages on hold with a message like “I am on email hiatus until October 18th; you can reach me via Twitter or phone. If your message requires a response, please resend it after October 18th.”
• Cyclic archiving. Once every month or so, take every email that’s been in your inbox for more than a week and drag it into an archive folder.
• Email bankruptcy. Coined by Sherry Turkle and popularized by Lawrence Lessig, “email bankruptcy” means dragging your entire email backlog to an archive folder and sending a mass email explaining that any message that needs a reply should be resent.

FROM A USER: Archive, don’t file. Search systems are fast enough that any time spent figuring out which folder an email should be in is effectively wasted.—David Ascher, Mozilla Labs Director, Mozilla Corporation