Slaying Your Email Dragons

On May 19, 2014, in Being a GA/TA, Monday Motivation, Tools, by gregorynpaziuk

Every Monday from April to June, the GATA Network will be sharing advice on how to make your summer productive. This week we offer suggestions on how to manage your emails so that your inbox doesn’t become that unruly monster you avoid.

UWindsor Gmail

Email is clearly a mixed bag. Sure, we’ve gained a lot through email’s ability to instantaneously connect us to other people, important documents, and (most importantly) pictures of friends’ babies. But gone are the days when we used to wait at the window for the mail person to bring us that letter we were waiting on for weeks. So too are gone the hours in the day, which are now dominated by a constant barrage of emails on our computers, tablets, phones, and (apparently) wrist watches. How can we get out in front of the email tides and carry on with the rest of our lives?

As Clive Thompson argues, the constant need to check emails at all hours of the day can actually be counter productive in the least, and destructive in the worst. What’s worse, Thompson notes that more and more studies in the business world are suggesting that the majority of day-to-day emails are pretty useless. Academia brings its own brand of useless emails, too. So how can we make sure we’re getting good use out of our email time?

Slaying your email dragons starts with scaling “Mt. Inbox”. It doesn’t take long for your inbox to become mountainous. Depending on your role and the number of emails you get per day, even a week’s worth of emails can represent a formidable organizational challenge. The goal: reach “inbox zero”.

How to “Inbox Zero”-in on Your Target

Manage Your Filters. Gmail has a number of ways to filter your incoming emails to make sure you’re seeing only the stuff in your inbox that you really care about. Whether you’re trying to avoid certain people who email you ten times a day for no reason, or if you’re waiting on one really important email, filters can help you move emails to different folders for later review, collect similar emails into a more specific folder, and even forward important emails to your phone via text. Check out CM Smith’s “5 Gmail Filters to Get You to Inbox Zero“.The concept of “inbox zero” is pretty simple: unless you have new mail – email you’ve never seen before – your inbox shouldn’t have anything in it. If, while reading that description, the voice in your head says “Well, duh”, then chances are you don’t need help managing your inbox. However, for the 5,999,999,999 rest of us out there, the empty inbox is elusive. This is how you can get there with the UWindsor Gmail.

Delete or Archive. The only way to actually reach inbox zero is to limit how much you have in your inbox. That’s why, as Zoe Fox explains, it’s not enough to simply mark emails as “Read” when you’re trying to get your email organized. The simplest thing to do is just delete what you’ve read. However, it’s usually a good idea to have a record of communication when contacting students, answering questions, etc. In that case, you may want to archive your emails instead. This way they won’t clutter your inbox but can still be easily retrieved. George Williams led a useful discussion thread on how to archive emails a while back for ProfHacker. Find the thread at “(How) Do You Archive Your Old Email?

There’s an App for That. There are actually so many apps for that, and so many patches if you are an HTML wizard. Mailbox is a popular tool for Gmail users. Gmail Snooze requires a little more programming savvy.

Offer Email Alternatives

One way to manage your inbox is to encourage would-be emailers to communicate with you in other ways. Consider this the preemptive approach: you can manage your inbox by limiting the amount of emails likely to show up there.

Not sure whether something is more appropriately handled over email or after class/during office hours/during an online discussion group? Erin Aspenlieder and McMaster University devote an entire chapter to communicating with students in their Teaching Assistant Guide 2011-2012. Among her recommendations, Aspenlieder suggests which discussions are most appropriate for office hours and which you should preface in your email policy.

For more on constructing an email policy:

  • Consult the University of Windsor’s Student Email Policy
  • Review “The Roles of GAs and TAs in Online Learning” in the GA/TA Handbook for its sample email policy

However, George Williams at ProfHacker agrees with his colleagues that an email policy is not enough, but a “communication policy” can go a long way towards encouraging students to limit the number of emails they inundate you with. Williams offers some alternatives:

Instead of emailing you, students could do any number of other things, including but not limited to the following:

  • Talk to you in a 2-minute face-to-face conversation in class, right after class, or during your office hours;
  • Chat with you using an instant messenger service during your “digital office hours” …;
  • Consult your (surely well-designed) syllabus and course calendar to find the answer they need;
  • Ask another classmate for help.

Going Old School (We Digress)

Justin Dunnivant from GradHacker also recommends starting a “physical inbox” to help streamline all of your communication efforts. Filing all of those papers you receive in an average student teacher work day into an “inbox”, organized according to item and action, can help make sure your dining room table doesn’t become a landing spot for grad forms, student handouts, other notes, and the like. After all, you can waste as much time organizing random papers as you can answering useless emails.

 

 

 

One Response to Slaying Your Email Dragons

  1. […] Slaying Your Email Demons (May 19th) […]

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