Taming Your Email
If I ever opened Outlook in the mornings and saw a slew of emails (unread or read) in my inbox, I’d get depressed. Seriously, how can one not feel anxious when seeing (1,323) unread messages sitting in their inbox? If you need a full searchable, secured, and compliance archive solution; then take a look at our long-term Compliance Archive service. Otherwise, take a look below at some of the things I do to prevent email from taking over my life:
• Operate a Zero-Sum email policy. If an email arrives in your inbox, address it, file it, or delete it. In simpler terms, my inbox is not a storage folder–it’s an inbox.
• Never use your Deleted/Trash folder as a storage folder. If you need to file that piece of mail somewhere other than your inbox, then create a folder for that specific purpose. Your deleted folder should be empty most of the time. In fact, you can configure most email applications to remove all contents in the Deleted/Trash folder when you exit the application. Those still reading this probably just laughed at me for suggesting that an email application is ever closed. Which brings me to my next suggestion…
• Close your email application when you are finished working. Trust me when I tell you that your email is still flowing. The brain operates on triggers. By closing down your email application at the end of the day, or when you are not using it tricks your mind into relaxing a bit. Granted, it will probably take your brain a few days to stop freaking out that the email application has been closed; but you will thank me later. We have conditioned our brains to a pavlovian response: Tingle Dingle, check email, tingle dingle, check email, tingle dingle, check email. Get the picture? Your brain is on high alert, waiting for that sound. Close down the app, place your device on silent, and relax.
• Unsubscribe. Most SPAM really isn’t SPAM at all, it’s BACN (pronounced Bacon). If you are unfamiliar with this term, BACN is email that has been subscribed to, but most likely never gets read–think newsletters, sales ads, etc. Now, why they call this BACN is a mystery. Personally if I ask for bacon, I eat the bacon; but I digress. If an email that appears to be BACN arrives into your inbox and you have no desire to ever read these types of emails again from this particular business; unsubscribe. If you received an obviously suspicious piece of email from someone you do not recognize, do not unsubscribe – report it as SPAM. Many spammers use recognizable names to embed their advertising but the unsubscribe link on the bottom just takes you to their site that confirms your email address as valid. Soon after you click it you’ll see an exponential increase in SPAM.
Needless to say, ExchangeDefender is a great solution to keep the email overload from impacting your productivity. Through use of web file sharing to send important documents, compliance archiving to keep 10 years of email and locate anything you need instantaneously, encryption to protect and secure data, we are continuously looking at how we waste time in our Inbox and we fix it with ExchangeDefender.
Michael Alligood
Partner Account Manager
michael@ownwebnow.com
877-546-0316 x707