Tackle an Impossibly Large E-mail Inbox (Without Getting Fired)

Many companies do most of their primary communication via e-mail, which can be a problem if you leave the office for a few days and fall behind. Coming back to an inbox with 300 messages can be a Sisyphean task -- new messages can arrive faster than you can resolve the old ones.

So how do you manage your inbox? In a word, smartly. Here are five tips for how to take control of an overflowing inbox when you get back from vacation or some other out-of-office stint:

Let everyone know you're not monitoring e-mail. When you leave the office for more than a couple of days, be sure to leave an out-of-office message that reminds everyone about the dates you'll be away.

Check with the boss. When you return to the office, sort your mail by name and check for stuff from your boss (and your boss's boss). Do that stuff. Then worry about the rest.
Ask for re-sends. If you expect to be away long enough that you will have a hard time digging out from under an undifferentiated mound of e-mail, be sure to tell people in your out-of-office message to resend high priority e-mail to you the day you return to the office. This sounds counter-productive; after all, it could lead to many duplicate messages. But it works well if you...

Address your mail from the newest to the oldest. If someone sent you a request 2 weeks ago, they either got what they needed a different way by now, they've resent the request (so another copy will be at the top of your stack), or it really wasn't that important to begin with. Maybe you'll get to the old stuff eventually, but your company needs you to address issues that are a priority today, not stuff that seemed important 2 weeks ago.

After a couple of days, archive anything that's still more than a week old. Write that stuff off. Don't delete it, of course, but if you haven't had time to act on old e-mail within a few days of returning and no one has bugged you about it, assume you can safely ignore it.

Photo by Torley