Am I alone in feeling pressurised to respond to emails as soon as they arrive? Do you find yourself apologising for the delay in replying to an email even when that delay might only be a few hours?

Emails are now a part of our everyday lives and certainly an active part of our business activities but who is in control? I’m sure we all feel we are but if we are honest with ourselves are we not actually being controlled?

Particularly in business we all strive to offer the best possible service to our clients and colleagues and most of us have become conditioned into feeling that we need to always be in touch. Or maybe we are just frightened that we may miss out on something!

Either way, emails are here to stay (at least until the next generation of messaging comes along) so like them or hate them
we need to learn how to keep in control and not be controlled. It might seem odd but one of the steps I took to achieve this was to be able to collect my emails whilst on holiday! Some people look forward to holidays with no email and I was one of them. But, arriving back in work to be faced with literally hundreds (even with good anti-spam measures in place) of unread emails only served to make me feel that I needed another holiday. In addition it was all too easy to overlook an important email “hidden” amongst all the rest. By being able to use a “quiet” moment or two each day to sieve through that day’s emails I find that I can still remain in “holiday” mode and not have the stress on my return.

Of course you have to adapt to this and I’ve found the following works for me:

1. Still use your “Out of Office” settings stating that you away from the office and NOT that you are still in email contact.
2. Disable “Push” and only trigger a download when you want to actually see the headers. Remember the email senders will have received your Out of Office notification and so are not expecting a quick reply.
3. Download email headers only. This not only speeds up the download but makes it easier to quickly delete the obvious “spam”.
4. Set up a sub folder that you can move emails that do require some action from you upon your return to. This way it’s easy to deal with them when you’re back at work and not miss them amongst the “read” emails in your inbox.
5. Delegate, if possible, emails that do require a more urgent response from you to a colleague to deal with by forwarding it to them with a short note.

Am I the only one to feel like this about emails? Please let me have your views and other ideas and hints and tips that you use as these could be useful to others.