Teaching is a juggling act and there is bound to be a ball or two that get dropped. For me, the one thing that always got neglected was my e-mail inbox.
Rarely did I have a chance to check it, and rarer still did I have a chance to act on the e-mails. Newsletters from various organizations piled up unread, questions from parents got answered if they were able to catch up with me before or after school, and requests and to do's from my Director seemed to get lost somewhere in the shuffle.
An article I read recently has completely revamped how I handle e-mail, and it's made me more productive and less stressed. I am a visual person and it was incredibly overwhelming to open my inbox to find a 100 messages there. That amounts to 100 things I was supposed act on that I knew I was going to be able to get to.
Now that I am consistently putting into practice the tips in this article I do not have an inbox with an overwhelming number of messages, and I've been able to prioritize better, filing newsletters away in folders with subject lines that accurately describe the contents so that I can access it when I need it, rather than feeling like I had to read it now, relevant or not.
If you are overwhelmed by your inbox here is the article that helped me: Is it time for an inbox detox?
Other resources include:
Inbox Detox E-Book
E-mail Assessment Quiz
