How do you manage overwhelming work emails that need complex replies?

[CareBearClaire]

I need help!

My email at work is overwhelming - it’s controlling me and I just can’t keep up. I provide complex advice for a large organisation, so none of my messages are ever simple to reply to, they often take a lot of thought or action to close off or move to the next stage.

I’m looking for suggestions on good methods of managing email. Filing isn’t an option as I don’t have time to file (once I’ve replied to an email I drop it into a large generic file) but it’s relentless and I can’t unsubscribe from anymore.

Any suggestions appreciated!

Co pilot. Write some basics and ask it to write it better. Then check for accuracy and appropriateness. Ensure you use ‘conversation view’ and have an autofilling set to put some immediately into a sub folder that is lower priority.

I just mark as unread after I’ve pasted onto a document so I can work on the reply and leave it unread until I have replied

Can you do an email auto-response explaining your estimated timeframe to deal with emails (do you have an internal SLA?) and you'll contact them if you need to extend it?

Voice dictate the replies?
But the main issue may not be the emails as such. It's people putting the monkey on your back as (I think?!) Peter Drucker the late management guru once put it. Meaning that, once your colleagues have asked you a question, it's off their desk and the ball's in your court.
Is there any way you can move the questions off email and into meetings/office hour? Or Zoom calling, where the advice you give can be recorded and transcribed by an AI agent and emailed to the relevant party?

Sounds like your workload is edging into or already unmanageable. Have you addressed that with your Manager.

The auto response is a good idea, as is AI.

I deal with escalated issues and understand sometimes replying to complex issues for unhappy customers can take a lot of thought. AI can be useful though I always sanity check and prefer not to use it where possible because, well, you can often tell.

This. As long as you know what you're doing it's absolutely brilliant

Absolutely. Co-pilot. Bullet point your replies and then ask it to expand. Always give it your amends back so it learns your own writing style.

I do the same, I’ll write a short reply in my own words and ask copilot to rewrite for “senior stakeholders.” If it a complex reply I will put the entire thread into copilot.

If I don’t know how exactly to respond to the email, I input my desired outcome into copilot.

Claude is like CoPilot but on steroids. Both good, but Claude trains so much better. You can connect your emails so that it “learns” and create agents to write responses on your behalf. Game changer.

if you use outlook utilise the tags/categories

eg needs action
waiting for client response
Waiting for info

etc - they are colour coded so you can see at a glance where you are with each one.

Are the emails on top of work you have to do via other channels? I find the relentless emails and teams messages too much of a distraction at times and turn off notifications so I can actually focus on my work. I’m not sure how or when this happened but the last few years seem to be just an increasing amount emails which require responses.

I love the tags, I have multiple inboxes and they help me create order out of chaos. I also share an inbox and once my colleague tags I know we have both done what we need to do with the information and can file.

Copilot - paste the request and write a short response of what the answer is and copilot can create the response.

Double check everything is correct. Then copy and paste - make sure you remove the copilot prompts.

You could use this for the less technical responses you need to do.

Copilot is fairly game Changing for this kind of thing, get it to write, or brief an email reply based on what you want to say. And then just edit, fact check, and amend where necessary. You’ll fly.

Except Claude will be pulling info from everywhere, CoPilot will only focus on your business, which is much better when the emails are internal.

Another shout out for co pilot, I'll tend to speak to it for meeting notes, then get a summary of the meeting, and email to the customer. It's taken off so much of the mental load, it's saved me!

Are any of your queries able to be grouped into a similar category?
Could you possibly have some standard templates for any that come through that are similar to the others that can be tweaked a little each time to the specifics?

I use copilot a lot for customer emails and get it to write a response in the required style. Now I have a series of stock messages to deal with common situations. These are so nicely worded that the customer is made to feel that I am personally involved in their issue whereas the desire is to distance myself and just get them off my back. It can also give you some useful techniques for batting the issue back to the other arty - particularly f you are about to go on vacation and want to empty your desk.

Ask AI for methods and step by step instructions. For example templates might be appropriate or clever use of rules to flag items for your urgent attention and autoreply to others with timescales

AI goes through all my emails and puts them into categories of urgency. It then writes suggested replies in my tone. For complex emails I copy in all documents / context. I check, remove obvious AI stuff, and send.

Pretty surprised you’re not using AI to help with this already.

some good suggestions here, and also that if the volume is just too much then advising of a timeframe is wise, as suggested up thread

It js funny to think that they might well be using AI back. Basically it’s just AI emailing each other with our names at the bottom now.

Co pilot is the way to go ! Been. A game changer. Especially when some emails
you are responding to are AI generated!

Just bang it out then get copilot to polish

Copilot. "Write me a reply to this email in a professional, friendly tone, make sure to include XYZ"

Template responses.

Some kind of filing - I know you say you don't have time for it but it works!

Permanent out of office letting people know your turnaround time, so they won't chase a response and cause more traffic.