Email Triage
Jim Newcomb
Recruiter & Retiring to AI Solutions | Founder of VenBot – Website AI Agents for Small Businesses
Email Triage: A simple email management system for greater productivity
If there’s one business tool that’s a double-edged sword when it comes to productivity, it’s email. My career is long enough to remember when the phone, fax, and postal mail were the only forms of business communication. There’s no question that email triage has made many things move faster. Information is shared, decisions are made and communicated, and agreements are reached far more quickly than in those days.
It has come at a cost, however.
What does your inbox look like?
What’s the state of your inbox? How many messages sit unread? How many more – read, responded to, dealt with – still lie there, buried deeper and deeper below a growing stack? If you’re like most people, the answer to both questions is, “more than I’d like to admit.”
As valuable as it is, email can be a huge drain on productivity and effectiveness in several ways. Many people use their email inbox as a ‘to-do’ list, hoping (usually in vain) that an email will prompt them to take whatever action might be required. Some use it as a database, a repository of information about ongoing projects. This is a nearly sure-fire way to lose track of critical data. On top of all that, we experience growing fatigue as our inboxes fill up. There’s so much information there that even finding a starting point is daunting.
For these reasons, email inbox management is a topic I’ll come back to several times in this space. I plan to share with you several ways that you might choose to rein in this part of your working life, making technology work for you rather than the other way around.
Email Triage
Today, I’d like to share a system that a friend of mine uses to help manage a specific kind of email. He currently manages a team of about twenty people in his working life. The team is mainly remote, meaning that email is their primary form of communication. On top of this, my friend is also involved in several volunteer activities, resulting in additional emails from board and committee members – sometimes dozens every day. All of which is to say, the volume of emails from “internal” communication alone (from staff and colleagues, before any client or supplier emails are counted) is staggering.
For this reason, he uses a coding system for these internal emails, training staff and other colleagues to adopt it when communicating with each other. This coding system means that this portion of their email load – the internal communication – can be “triaged” quickly and efficiently.
Set of Codes
They use a set of three codes – RSVP, ACT, and FYI – inserted at the beginning of the email subject line. Without even opening the email, the codes send the following messages to the recipient:
RSVP
RSVP means, “I need you to reply to me. It’s probably a piece of information you have, and I don’t, or I need your input on a decision. Get back to me as soon as you can.”
ACT
ACT means, “There’s something here I need you to do. I might need you to contact somebody else or change something in a database. I don’t need you to get back to me; unless I hear back otherwise, I’ll assume that you completed it.”
FYI
FYI means, “You’re receiving this because you may be interested, or you may need a record of the conversation. You don’t need to reply, and you don’t need to do anything. Feel free to skim the email at your convenience and file it wherever appropriate.”
ACT and FYI do not require a response. This system eliminates the need for an answer. If you’re like me, you need the loop closed. What I’ve been doing, in Outlook, to acknowledge receipt without replying is to use the “thumbs up” action item in the upper right corner of the email. This quick click lets the sender know that you received it.
Email Triage Conclusion
My friend, and the people he works with, reclaim valuable time each day by helping each other quickly and efficiently deal with a significant percentage of their email load. If you deal with a high volume of emails from staff teams and other colleagues, consider sharing this system with them and adopting it if it could help.
Triage is a simple solution for email management. There are many others with many more tips. Here are a few from well-known sources.
Look for more email management tips in this space in the future. Together, we can turn this double-edged sword to our advantage!
Author: Jim Newcomb