Managing a High Volume of Work-Related Emails

Believe it or not, there was a time when the daily task of going through your work inbox didn't begin with weeding through Viagra ads and chain letters. Poring through that box on your desk full of interdepartmental memos and letters that actually arrived by postal service was a daunting daily chore, but unless you worked for a plastic surgeon you could be pretty sure none of your correspondence was about breast augmentation.

Today, our inboxes are more cluttered than ever. They just don't take up valuable real estate on our desk, since our primary method of communication is email. Customers and co-workers can reach us instantly with a click of the "send" button, and to respond to them all we need to do is hit "reply" and type away.

In theory, email has made our work lives much easier. But communication tools that make things faster are a double-edged sword. While we might be more efficient, there is also an expectation that our responses will be immediate.

Whether I like to admit it or not, I'm old enough to remember thinking of email as a cool new toy that would help me get through my work day faster. That hasn't proved to be the case. Sure, I can respond to people with much more ease than I could in the days of printing and mailing letters or actually picking up the phone. But people can get to me much easier too, and they can do it at midnight. Email has chipped away at the notion of a "9 to 5" workday. Many professionals find themselves checking their work messages not just on the job, but from home in off-hours and during vacations, just to keep up with the pace of business.

In a fast-paced environment where your boss, the guy in the cube next to you, and your clients all expect a response yesterday, it is easy to slip into bad habits. We all use email in our personal lives too, and messages to our friends and family rarely look like form letters. After a while, email just doesn't seem like email unless it's plagued with typos, LOLs, and smiley-faces. Sometimes our careless or informal habits slip into our work correspondence.