Do you have 100 emails coming in every day, and you can only deal with 60 of them?

Is email the bane of your life?

Are you slowly going under?

….well, I’d like to say:

                 Don’t blame email

it’s a sign of a more fundamental time management problem.

Email is just the messenger.  I agree that it is an easy one, tempting you to copy in ten people or write rather than phone, but still, it’s just the messenger.

If you’ve got too much coming in, it’s a sign of a deeper time management problem – you’ve got more work than you can handle.

So, as with all time management overload situations, you have the famous five options (see the Turnip of Time from my Management Vegetables book only £2.99) which are…

– say no to more stuff, including to some emails – ask to be taken off the list, or ask to be phoned rather than emailed

– negotiate over stuff (get them to do part of it, trade it for something else, who does it, where you do it, etc)

– delegate more – either this task or other tasks to make room for this one

– have more efficient systems (automate, spreadsheets, check lists, group tasks together, be trained, have great equipment, don’t get distracted etc)

– do things less perfectly / be less fussy

Until you get better at some of the above, ideally all of them, there is no magic bullet to sort out your email problem.  It’s bigger than just email!