THE CAPRANICA

Hi Brett, great to see you last Saturday. The parables class by Mobley was great. A few of my email strategies:
1) I try very hard to keep my email inbox clean and uncluttered. Most are actioned immediately, and I rarely have emails sitting that are over a week old.
2) I have about 20 folders. If I find myself not using a folder very often, I will delete it and move those emails into another category.
3) I hardly ever permanently delete emails, as I sometimes find myself looking for correspondence from over a year ago.
4) The only folder that I have created ‘rules’ for is my Prayer folder. I receive several e-newsletters from IMB, NAMB, California Family Council, etc., that go directly into this prayer folder and are waiting for me when I go to prepare our weekly prayer bulletin.

Stephen, it was great to see you also Saturday.

About how many e-mail do you receive a day?

After you deal with an e-mil do you then move it to a folder?

Can you list some of the folders you have?

I receive maybe 15-20 emails a day. When working an administrative job out in the secular workforce, it was much higher. Perhaps 40-50 on average.

On very busy days, I would take about 15 minutes just to scan through all my emails and prioritize them (needs urgent response, needs action today, needs action in 2-3 days, no action needed). Sometimes, I would print them out and sort through the hard copies.

Yes, I usually move emails into folders after taking action. Or, if I’m not ready to respond/take action immediately, I will jot the item on my ‘to do’ tablet and move the email to folder.

As a pastor, my folders are basically categorized according to ministry. E.g. deacons, discipleship, missions, prayer, secretary, youth. I also have a folder called “To print/distribute” to save copies of emails that contain important correspondence and need to be distributed to people in the church who don’t have email.

What email tricks do you use?

Wow i only get around eight or nine emails a day….. and most are just spam or news letters E.G. Dell Deals new job listings, new eggdeals or a tracking number to something. although i do do about thirty text messages per day, on average.

[...] few weeks ago, I linked to and posted a question about how to handle e-mail clutter. I think it is safe to assume that the vast majority of modern and ordinary pastors deal with [...]