MGR IT

If you are anything like me, then dealing with e-mail is a significant time drain and anything that will help you deal with e-mail more efficiently can greatly improve your productivity.  If you are an Outlook user, then one feature that may help is the ability to highlight messages with different colours.

To do this, go to Tools – Organize in the Outlook menu.  Outlook gives you three options for organising your Inbox, but the one I am interested in today is the Using Colors option.  When you click on this tab, you have the option of using different colors to highlight messages based on who sent them, who they were sent to or whether they were sent only to you. 

For example, I receive alert messages from the monitoring software that we use to monitor client systems, so to make sure that those stand out, I use the Organize feature to highlight those message in red.  If you receive a lot of group messages, you might choose to highlight the messages sent only to you in a different colour so that they stand out among the messages sent to groups to which you belong.

I try to stick to an Inbox Zero methodology for dealing with e-mail, so nothing stays in my Inbox for an extended period, but colour-coding messages as they come in to my Inbox is another weapon in my battle to tame the e-mail beast.  It certainly makes facing my bulging Inbox every morning that little bit easier.

Having worked in IT support and consulting for many years, I know which calls tend to receive quick attention and which ones are left at the bottom of the pile.  Any decent service centre will have processes for determining the priority of support calls and escalating those calls appropriately, but service desks and call centres are manned by people, so human nature is always a factor in how support calls are processed and resolved.

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Estimates for the proportion of e-mail that is actually spam range from 80-95%. Whatever the exact figure, it is obviously very high. Efforts to produce technological solutions to the problem are ongoing, but there is no magic bullet just around the corner.

Here, then, is a brief rundown of spam avoidance methods that are available now to minimise the problem as far as possible.

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If you’re anything like me (and most of the business world), then you receive a huge amount of e-mail every day and keeping on top of it can be very difficult.  Maybe you have some techniques for keeping the mountain of e-mail under control.  Maybe you just keep every e-mail you’ve ever received in your Inbox.  Maybe you have made a New Year’s resolution to become better at processing e-mail.

While it wasn’t really a New Year’s resolution for me, I have decided to try to streamline my e-mail management processes, using a method that falls under the heading of Inbox Zero.  This is a term that encompasses a wide range of techniques and tricks, but essentially it means processing e-mails as they come in, dealing with each e-mail in your Inbox once and keeping the number of messages sitting in your Inbox at zero.  It sounds like a fantasy at first, but it becomes more feasible and attractive when you look at what that actually means.

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