How The Big Names Tame Email

from the one-at-a-time dept

You think you get a lot of email? What if you were famous and your email address was posted everywhere? Here's an article asking a number of well known business execs how they handle the deluge of email. Each apparently has their own method, but there were a few consistent approaches. Some people refuse to read email at all (including the President of the US). If something is important, they need to be informed by another method. Some people let their assistants handle the mail, and then place important messages in a separate folder for them to read. The most popular solution, of course, is to use filters to sort out emails - often having a whitelist for friends that goes directly through, while all others get shifted to an assistant to review/respond/trash. Amusingly, Bill Gates uses just such a filter - but you won't find it in Outlook. He wrote it himself for his own personal use. Another "coping mechanism" appears to be the use of wireless devices like the Blackberry to help them catch up on emails during "down time". Surprisingly, many admitted that they just used a single email for all correspondences and didn't have a special "private email" that they used for friends. In the end, though, it sounds like none of those interviewed really felt overwhelmed by email. They all seemed to believe the benefits of email far outweighed the time it took to deal with it all.

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