Play the Game of Life
Ryan Petersen's Blog

Columbia Professor Michael Feiner has a great post about managing e-mail overload. His advice is solid, although a bit more conservative than the innovative "batching" solution put forth by Tim Ferriss, author of the Four-Hour Workweek.

Feiner's top five tips:

1. Set some ground rules to help employees decide which conversations should be handled via email and which should be handled face-to-face or phone-to-phone.

2. Restrict your email to a certain number per day per person.

3. Don't use email for those occasions when you're trying to motivate, inspire, galvanize or energize.

4. Ask an admin to vet emails and try to handle the less important ones themselves, passing on the most important ones to you.

5. If the matter being discussed is urgent, put "urgent" on it -- and if this is a crisis, and you really need an answer immediately, put that in the subject line. Sometimes people cheat with this, but even if people are playing it straight 70 percent of the time, this will very often get you to the most critical emails during the day, and the others you can defer.

Labels: Columbia Business School, e-mail