Time management: How do I handle the email flood after my vacation?
The time-saving way to work through your emails professionally and easily.
A flood of emails after your vacation in your inbox and two appointments in the first day of work. How do you go about getting back up to date?
1: Allow for at least one day of working through your workload.
If you expect to have to work through a flood of emails after your holiday, the target date in the absence note should not be your first work day but the second, for example. Then you can use the first work day to process the piled-up emails.
2: Only pre-sort in the first pass, but don’t work through yet.
Start your first pass by going from the newest to the oldest email. That way you can determine whether newer emails have made older ones obsolete. In such a case you can move them into their appropriate folder, such as „Archive“ or „Storage“.
Important for you: Do not work on any emails on your first pass! Pre-sort:
- Create folders such as „Prio A“, „Prio B“ and „Prio C“ as well as folders named after important topics or operations and move applicable emails into them – or
- assign categories by importance and topics.
Finally, work through the related topic blocks, from the oldest to the newest e-mail.
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