Karla Brandau - Email Survival Skills: Survival Tips Compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2010 & 2013

The nature of email has dramatically changed since 1971 when it first came on the scene. It went from a novel way of corresponding to a variety of people to a major tool for communication in every company around the world.

Physical letters used to be a way to keep in touch with family and friends who lived far away, like my parents. I left them in Idaho and made my way south to Atlanta, Georgia to seek my fortune. Unfortunately, email has replaced sending letters through the mail to loved ones, which could be read and reread, and then carefully folded and tucked away to be read again at a future date.

Even if an email contained something personal that would be appealing to keep, the thought of cutting down trees to print out the email keeps most emails in the computer and stored in an archived place that is never to be found again.

If you have loved ones who dont like email or dont use email, communication with them may be limited to an annual Christmas card. However, even Christmas cards are being replaced by emails and electronic holiday cards.

On a flight to Los Angeles last week, I overheard a conversation between two women. The first woman said she would rather have been born a homesteader on a ranch in the 1800s than have to open and answer email messages. This woman did not understand the marvelous points about email. You use it because you want:

1. Speed, not snail mail.
2. To communicate with a colleague, employee or customer in a country on the opposite side of the world during your own waking hours.
3. To send a message to many different people simultaneously. With email, you can send an email to one or 1,000 people and deliver the same message to them.
4. Instant and constant accessibility from any device you own.
5. When on a tight deadline, you can work the weekend and email your finished product to your manager or team leader on Sunday night, and they will never know because they have it first thing Monday morning; unless Murphys Law prevails and your internet is down.

Even though these are valid reasons for having email, if you are the recipient of hundreds of emails per day, then it can take on an oppressive nature that causes minor depression and major emotional blues.

When you open your inbox and emails start dumping in, questions race through your mind: How can I stop the avalanche, or the deluge? How can I survive the volume of work contained in simple emails? Cant SPAM be stopped? How can I get through these by the end of the day? How can I organize them? How can I get through the workload when several emails contain requests that require 2-3 hours of work?

This book is written to help you survive 21st century email. Enjoy!

Email is a major factor in conducting business in companies all over the world. In this age of instantaneous electronic communications, business simply could not keep up with the pace of information that is exchanged without email. Thank heavens it replaced business letter writing and faxes, which were heavily used in the 20th century.

When you consider reading and responding to emails on a daily basis, email takes a major investment of your time. In fact, current studies find that up to half of your working hours may be spent plowing through emails or other forms of electronic communication such as instant messaging (IM), texts, and contributing to conversations on social networks.

The process overwhelms most people and quite frankly it puts them in a bad mood daily.

Survival requires a paradigm shift, to use a word popular for decades. It requires a shift from rolling your eyes and shutting your ears to the sucking sound of lost time and the realization that email SAVES you time.

Some business transactions are completed entirely by email, eliminating the need for personal visits, saving time and gasoline. Email reduces the irritating game of telephone tag and the time spent in social niceties required by one-on-one or face-to-face interactions. Not that being polite and friendly is not required in an email, but email is much more straight-forward and bottom-line oriented than personal visits or phone conversations.

Email is a time saver so change your attitude and use the survival tips in this book. Youll be pleasantly pleased with the results if you do. Together well examine email from its ups and downs, ins and outs, and round-abouts. Well examine how corporate culture affects email and what you can do to quickly process the entire inbox while enabling yourself to reduce your stress from the daily deluge of email.

More importantly, the principles in this book will help you save time when processing your inbox.