E-mail sanity
How many user names and passwords do you have? Too many?
Yahoo, Fisher webmail, OSU/Buckeyemail, FisherConnect, MBAFocus, Facebook, LinkedIn, The Hub, Wordpress. And those are just the accounts I check often. And no, I don’t have the same password for all of them. I was told that’s unsafe.
E-mail is sometimes too much to handle. Enter Randall Dean, the e-mail sanity expert. He was the speaker of a “Time and E-mail Management Seminar” yesterday.
Turns out, I was to blame with my e-mail and time problems. Well, I kind of knew that but didn’t know there were simple adjustments I could do to change that. Let me share three of the tips.
I’m a blinger. A blinger is someone who has a constant need to check his e-mail with every ‘bling’ alert he hears. According to Randy, blinging temporarily decreases one’s IQ because of the information overload. This must be the reason why I’m a bit spaced out every time. Anyway, he advises control. Check your email only a few times per day, not a few times per hour.
How many messages do you have in your inbox? Randy has practically nothing in it, and receives more than 100 e-mails per day. He has a three-minute, one-touch rule. When you read your e-mail, decide what to do with it immediately. You already spent time reading it. If you postpone taking steps, you would have to read it again, or have to remember if you already acted on that. You can reply, file, read, forward, or delete it. This only takes three minutes.
Take advantage of the productivity tool that is Microsoft Outlook (or other software). Randy gave a lot of tips on how to maximize the software’s features. Now, if only I could get my Fisher webmail account to work in my outlook. I spent the entire Friday night (while waiting for the laundry to finish and the bathroom floor to dry) trying to fix it.