Leadership By Numbers

Too much e-mail. You know it, I know it, so I'm not even going to pull up statistics and white-papers to explain a phenomenon that is as common as the paper pile-up for this week's newspapers. It's a mess, so here are my best tips for reducing the size of your e-mail accounts.

What is the Right Size for E-Mail Files? I think of over-sized, unmanageable e-mail accounts as the equivalent to carrying a huge credit card debt, and only paying on the interest. The reason my mail file gets larger and larger is because I don't have the time to filter out what is important and what is not. The result is a mail file where I quickly answer the immediate needs, and postpone the uncertain choices. What is happening, is that "ambiguous" mail is bogging down the process, it's a lot of I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-it mail. I have too many e-mails that I can't process immediately, and I don't want a thousand folders for every category. Too much e-mail is an interest debt that drains away my work effectiveness. It's not about wasting space, it's about wasting time.

What's the best size of an e-mail file? 100 M ? 10 G ? I think the right size is the absolute minimum I need in order to communicate and accomplish my work. Removing unnecessary e-mail needs to happen, but too many documents are frozen in place by indecision.

E-Mail topics that get stuck in limbo:

• Announcements: Should I hold on to these until after the date?
• For Your Information: Well, now I'm not sure if I need to keep these or not.
• Group e-mail: I'm in a project or work group that collectively gets e-mail. Whose answering it? Maybe I should hold on to it until I make sure there is a reply. Or, do I need to hold on to these milestones as evidence of progress?
• Reports: I just get a zillion of these, they come as attachments with PDFs, spreadsheets, and word-processing documents. I should probably keep them somewhere. But, I don't have the time to worry through each document and excise every little attachment.
• E-mails that have embedded organizational politics: This could come back to haunt me, and I need to keep a record of the discussion.
• Go ahead, add bullet points for your own personal limbo categories.

Super Size Me? One solution for large e-mail accounts, has been to make them even larger. 10 Gigabytes is not enough? Some on-line, hosted solutions will provide 25 Gigabytes of e-mail storage. Yikes. More storage isn't going to get me out of my hole, it's simply a bigger shovel. I don't need bigger mail files, with more and more piles of dubious e-mail. I need clarity.

I need to go from retaining dump truck loads of e-mail, to the organized work space of my office. I have my messy days, but I don't go to management and beg for more square footage because I can't figure out what belongs on a shelf and what needs to be thrown out.

Slash and Burn. What's the best way to gain mastery over your e-mail? How can I pay down my e-mail “debt?” There is only one way to get rid of over sized e-mail accounts: delete documents. Oh. That's so easy, I'll just slash and burn my way through months (and maybe years) of correspondence and indiscriminately wipe my account clean.

Hm. Maybe the advice to delete documents is just as effective as controlling credit-card spending by saying “stop spending money.” What is needed is some honesty and a strategy. So, while there is only one ultimate solution (deleting unnecessary mail), it's very difficult to do it right.

Under the Waterfall. Your incoming e-mail is a deluge, over time it will continue to increase in volume. If the e-mail flows into your in-box like a stream, and the in-box dams up the processing, then sooner or later the dam breaks. The mail file either exceeds the limits to its physical size, or it becomes an unnavigable man-made disaster.

Let's move the flow of in-bound e-mail out of the in-box, quickly, so it doesn't back-up (and then you can see what is “immediate” with your in-box). You'll need to sort the mail into folders and delete the rest. But first, you need the magic folder.

The Magic Folder. Remember the topical list of documents floating in limbo? These are streaming into the mail file like logs floating downstream. They need to be sorted and removed, otherwise we get a huge log-jam and the work suffers. My problem is that I'm not smart enough to know which ones go where, or even which ones to keep or throw away. The actual value of most of my e-mail isn't going to be known for a least a month. I need a folder to make all the worthless e-mail disappear, and that's magic.

Here's how it works: if you can't figure out if a document has long-term worth, put it in short-term storage. Your Magic Folder is a place to keep documents for 60 to 90 days. Periodically, you open the folder and purge out the oldest documents, skimming off those which have exceeded their time limit.

If an ambiguous document hasn't been needed in over three months, it's safe to have it deleted. Therein is the magic: worthless documents are cleared out of your mail file. You just have to sideline them for a long enough period to feel comfortable with their removal.

The Magic Is 80% of Your Mail. Most of your e-mail is difficult to value for long-term retention. When I can't decide whether an e-mail needs to be sorted and kept, it's placed in the Magic folder. The remaining 20% of the documents are the ones I can easily process and sort into a variety of folders.

I have a folder for documents that contain important organizational politics--I just call it “For the record.” I have ones for projects, people (my immediate supervisor), and so-on. I know there are lots of ways that people structure their e-mail folders. I've seen mail files with nearly a hundred folders (and many of them were nested). And, I know people that have a reply-and-kill reflex, which leaves very few records to store.

If the e-mail isn't ambiguous, then you know how to handle it. I'm not interested in coming up with the definitive e-mail sorting mechanism, any more than I would be interested in identifying a universal list of labels for everyones kitchen pantry. We are all unique in our work habits. But, if you use a Magic Folder (or whatever you want to name it), then you'll find a tremendous increase in processing e-mail.

Next up: what to do with all those attachments?