“Master your Mailbox tip #6: Schedule regular reviews

This summer, we’re encouraging everyone to take control of their emails: you can free up time by getting rid of unnecessary emails and making sure that information is in the right place, whilst helping us to ensure that you and the University are compliant with Data Protection legislation.

Don’t worry, we don’t want to make you delete emails that you still find useful, but it is essential that every one of us starts to get our inboxes under control. If we don’t, the University will need to take more extreme action, like deleting all emails older than a certain age. We will be reviewing the situation at the end of September, so we appreciate any action you can take in the coming weeks.

You can take a look at our Email management resource for guidance, but we’ll also be posting a weekly tip in the Staff Notices. By following one tip a week, you can spread out the work into manageable chunks and by the end of September you’ll have mastered your mailbox.

 

Tip #6: Schedule regular reviews

We’ve spread our tips out over the summer to make mastering your mailbox a more manageable task, but longer term you can manage your emails to avoid developing a backlog of emails to be sorted or deleted.

One key tip for this is to create a short, regular event in your calendar to remind you to review your emails. This could be weekly (eg first thing on a Monday to prepare for the week ahead, or last thing on a Friday to finish the week with a clear inbox), monthly (eg a half hour at the start of every month to keep things in good order), or even annually (eg take a day in the summer to have a really thorough sort out).

In a regular review, you're looking to make sure that everything of business value is saved in the most appropriate place (eg accessible to all the right people and available for the right amount of time) and everything that no longer has any value is deleted. For everything in between, those emails that are useful to you for reference but perhaps not to anyone else, make sure they still are useful to you and that they don't contain unnecessary or out of date personal information.

Set up your regular task in your calendar now, and include a link to our Email Management webpage so that you will have our tips to hand when the review time comes around. The more regularly you do this, the easier it is.

You could also try scheduling specific tasks, such as:

 

Monthly or weekly tasks

• Clear your Deleted Items
• Clear your Topdesk import folders
• Delete Staff Notices and other circulars from a couple of months ago
• Check through your Sent box

 

Annual tasks

• Delete 'feedback, guidance and support' emails for students who left over 6 years ago
• Delete general day-to-day module/course emails from the previous academic year
• Delete any emails or folders you've flagged for deletion after a certain time
• Search for completed projects or old areas of work and take appropriate action

 

Check back next week for tip #7, or if you’re keen to continue, visit our full guidance at Email management.

Records Management Service