Are you “good” at email?

Now who would have thought that this would be a logical question? I know I didn’t.

But in the last few days I have realized that I am truly BAD at email.
Not bad in the sense I don’t know how to send, read, forward, things like that… but I’m bad at being efficient with my emailing.

I receive on average 30 emails a day, mostly newsletters, and stuff of that nature, with about 5-10 truly important emails in the middle. I know some of you receive WAY more… I’ve heard of stories where people get 500+ a day, and they are all from real people!

This blows my mind! I can’t even wrap my brain around that number of emails…especially that over the last 2 days the influx of an additional 30 (real people) emails has thrown me into a tizzy.

There is a guy named Merlin Mann…he’s a writer and speaker, but I consider him a guru on efficiency. I’ve listened to a few of his podcasts and he mentions being good at email a lot. Most of the time, it was in the context of an office setting (cubicles), where you have a lot of work to get done, but people expect you to respond to their emails. He’s even writing a book on email… called Inbox Zero.
Some of the points he makes in his talks, is to time manage your emailing, combine emails (don’t send an essentially meaningless email that can either wait, or be combined with more important info), things like this. Now a lot of it seems to hinge on other people hopping on board as well, but I’m curious enough now to want to check out the book.

Between, reading, forwarding, CC’ing, Replying, Reply All’ing, I hit a wall where it occurred to me that there has to be a more efficient way to do this. Which there is… I’m sure it’s already built into my email program, but I just need to learn to use it better.
Even though my email load is pathetic compared to some people, I hope that one day (and will probably regret saying this) that I have 100 meaningful emails a day to deal with.

Then again I’ll just hire an intern…meueawhahahahah!

So are you “good” at email?