You’re out sick. You come back. There’s ten to twenty times the email you’re used to seeing. Or…

Your minuscule blip on the web becomes famous seemingly overnight. Everyone seems to know who you are, and since you’re an internet celebrity, of course that seems to translate to “public property”. And everyone emails you. It’s drowning out your client and subscriber email. Or…

You never had a good handle on how to manage email. And suddenly there’s much more of it. Yikes.

What can you do? Here are the five most used strategies.

1. Auto-respond and backlog.With this strategy, you set up an autoresponder to say, essentially, that you’re catching up on back emails and give an estimated time of reply/action, after which concerned parties should resend. Handle new emails as they come in as well.

   Best for the amount of email you could work through in a few days.

2. Cut and run.Close the email account. Get another one. Best for when it’s not a work email - just a few friends or some family which will get the new address when you auto-respond the new address and/or send them a new one. The latter is preferable.
3. Prioritize by contact, mass delete/archive everything else.Only a few important people send you messages that you actually read? Sort your email by the person who sent it. Keep those messages in a new folder with that person’s name on it. Mass delete or archive everything else.
4. Mass delete/archive all of it and start over with hyper-organization.With this strategy, you’ll start over with the same email address. But first you’re going to find an organization system that makes sense to you, and have your mail auto-sort itself into folders by newsletter subscription or password reminders, people important to you, time sensitive emails, etc. Everything else should auto-sort to the trash or an archive folder.
5. Get a Peon.This is my favorite one and I swear by it. Get someone else to take care of your email. At an international organization that I worked for, you could tell who was important by who had their calendar and email kept or managed by another person. When you start getting mass amounts of mail due to popularity, it’s time for a staffer to handle that. If it’s your personal email, perhaps not…

Tags: email, email overload, email bankruptcy