The arrival of email has opened up a new communication channel that can be extremely efficient. Actually sometimes too efficient. It can take 30 seconds to write an email that means hours of work on the receiving side. This, together with the sheer volume of work-related emails that scientists tend to receive, can provoke a lot of stress.

Scientists (like myself) often struggle to organize themselves properly. It is then very tempting to use your inbox as a to-do list. The messages in your inbox are often connected to tasks, and you can simply leave them in the inbox until you have dealt with them. Most of my colleagues work this way.

THIS IS THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY OF ORGANIZING YOURSELF! It means namely that your daily work becomes dictated by the messages that you receive. This means that, in the end, others run your daily schedule instead of yourself! What you should do, instead, is make a proper (electronic or paper) personal organizer. This can be extremely simple and contain a task list including priorities and deadlines. You decide then yourself which part of the incoming email ends up one your task list and in which form.

The only exception are emails that can be dealt with instantly, which means within a few minutes. Your general rule should be that no mail can remain in your inbox for more then 5 minutes after you have read it. That means either you deal with it immediately (e.g. reply of a few lines), or save the mail elsewhere in your email directories and, if necessary, decide to create an input in your organizer or edit a previous input.

In filtering your tasks, make sure you give the highest priorities to tasks that you like to do and that are really important. In my case these are all the emails connected to scientific discussions. I therefore make sure that any interesting scientific mails end up high on my priority list. The risk is otherwise that you drown in boring admin stuff and forget what you were doing in the first place, namely science.

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