Drowning in email? Grab on to The Hamster Revolution!

Winning strategies for reducing email overload

Have you ever thought about the total time you spend processing email per year?  Well, Mike Song, Vicki Halsey, and Tim Burress, authors of The Hamster Revolution, have - and the number might surprise you.  Let's say you send and receive a conservative 50 messages a day and spend an average of 2 minutes on each message.  If you assume a work year of 240 days, that's 50 days/year on email!  If you could save even just 10% of that time by reading this short book, you would get back an extra week of your life!

A client in St. Louis gave me a copy of The Hamster Revolution and I read the entire book on the short flight between St. Louis and Washington, DC. We had been talking about email overload and she recommended the book as a quick way to pick up some very useful tips. I'm not always a big fan of this type of book but this book is a major exception - I'm pretty good about managing email and organizing my information, but I picked up several really helpful tips that I've already put into practice.

The Hamster Revolution Plan describes four strategies to help manage email:

• Strategy 1: Reduce email volume
• Strategy 2: Improve email quality
• Strategy 3: Coach others to send you more actionable email
• Strategy 4: File and find information fast with the authors' recommended file organization approach

I found useful tips in the chapters on each of the strategies - and one that just never occurred to me and has already saved me a lot of time. One of my favorite tips in Strategy 1 relates to trivial thank you messages. Basically, the advice is to reserve thank you messages for extraordinary effort and if it's really necessary to show appreciation more frequently, to include it as part of the greeting in a more necessary email. It is part of a "send less, get less" strategy.

Strategy 2 recommends, among other things, a strong subject with categories to build context.  I love this recommendation.  The key suggested words are Action, Request, Info, Confirmed (for a one-line message to confirm that you took a suggested action) and Delivery (when you are responding to a specific request).  Another great technique that I am now using more regularly is to include - eom at the end of a subject line to let the reader know that the entire message is contained in the subject line.

Strategy 4 suggests a consistent folder structure for emails, documents, and web links that the authors call COTA, for Clients, Output, Teams, and Admin. I already have my own approach that is similar so I'm sticking with it. The authors recommend setting up a "template" folder structure in a file that you'll call ZZ Power Drafts (so that it sorts at the bottom of your folder structure in My Documents). What had never occurred to me was that I could create a re-usable folder structure like this for emails in Outlook. I already save my emails into offline files. To keep the size of each file manageable, I create a new offline .pst file every 2 months with a consistent sub-folder structure. (I learned the structure I use from another client - someone who took a time management class and passed along the techniques he thought were especially helpful.) It just never occurred to me to save a copy of the structure so I wouldn't have to re-create the sub-folder structure each time I create a new .pst file. I don't know if it occurred to me that you can make a copy of a .pst file! That one small tip will save me a lot of time - and I'm sure that you will find similar ideas that will save you a lot of time as well.

I typically get a lot more than 50 emails each work day so even if I don't achieve the 20% reduction the book suggests you can achieve, I am looking forward to using the time I save to spend more time on my hobbies, spend a little more time at the gym, catch up on books I've been meaning to read, and maybe even post to my blog more frequently!

• Microsoft
• email overload
• Outlook