Holiday ZEB Goal Achieved!

No, this is not an invitation to send me mail... nor does it mean that I've run out of work to do. One of my personal goals this holiday season was to hit Zero E-mail Bounce so that I can start the new year off right.

I've used the quiet time this holiday season to move all the little work items and requests that have been sitting on my plate out of my inbox. Some have turned into larger scheduled meeting time I'll use to accomplish, some have been triaged off of my plate, and a bunch of smaller tasks have simply been done.

I made it 50% of the way through 2005 hitting a weekly ZEB and I'd like to see if I can't keep it up through the entirety of 2006 this time around.   

Here are some great free tips that would make everyone's e-mail management easier that I would also consider good new years resolutions. My favorites include:

• Give your reader full context at the start of your message.
• When you copy lots of people (a heinous practice that should be used sparingly), mark out why each person should care.
• Check e-mail at defined times each day.
• Ignore it.

A couple of these tips made my list of how to be successful at Microsoft post.

:-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 30, 2005
  Well.. I like your 2366 UNREAD items deleted ;-)
• Anonymous
  January 02, 2006
  Lots of reasons things end up in the deleted items bin.
  
  Most of them come from mailing lists I'm a member of. Everything from Xbox360 stuff to internal smart-phone discussions. I send just about everything by default to my inbox, but if the message was a reply to a message I wasn't interested in sent to one of the larger mailing lists it goes straight to deleted items. This way I see the start of every thread, but flag threads I want to see as not to delete. So a lot of these "job-unrelated" discussions go straight and to delete/unread unless they were sent specifically to me.