Friday, August 10, 2007

Managing email

Ernie the Attorney has an interesting blog post on managing email. His professed greatest tip is that not all emails require a response. Read the post for the explanation as to how he determines whether or not an email requires a response.

I also have a tip. If you're like the typical librarian, you subscribe to multiple listservs and get a number of listserv related emails every day. What I've done is to create Outlook folders for each listserv and to create rules to shuttle emails from the listservs into their proper folders. This means I don't have to read all the emails immediately, I can check them regularly. I do, of course, read the ones from the DALL listserv almost immediately.

Does anyone else have any great tips for managing email?

2 comments:

Jane Reynolds said...

I have lots of folders and use the rules to move emails around as Jennifer suggests.

I also am using the flags in Outlook 2003 to tag various items that I am waiting to finish. One way I use the flag is as a reminder that I have ILLs out.

Wendy Lyon taught me about the insert signature function. If you have a standard paragraph or sentence that you insert in an email delivery, then use the sig files to save the sentence and insert at will. It doesn't have to be for signatures only.

Jennifer Stephens said...

Another trick for remembering ILL dates - put it in your Outlook calendar as an appointment. You'll get that popup reminder that way.