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!

I reply to key stuff from boss and above quickly. Annoying persistent people I leave til very last. I then say ‘sorry I’ve been really busy’ and send basic reply. On purpose

Is email the main source of your work, or is it in addition to other intake streams? If there's other methods that people should be using to contact you e.g. raising a ticket, submitting a request form etc, then you should be ruthless and divert people to those channels.

If not, then try triaging every email as it comes in - spend no more than 5 minutes reading and deciding what needs to happen next. If you need more information from the sender, go back to them immediately with your questions and then file it. Ball is in their court now. If it has all the info you need but it needs time and thought on it, flag it for later and then when you are ready to work on it, upload it to copilot with your bullet point response and it will write a draft for you.

There are some great tips here but what is the root cause of you being overwhelmed? Is your job role to answer complex queries? Do you have too many to answer on which case can you create guidance/templates/FAQs which remove some elements of these queries?
I also wonder if allowing some things to be dealt with in a zoom or teams meeting is more productive or are written responses vital? If so would a AI summary of a meeting be appropriate?

OP - can you give more info about what your queries are? AI isn't appropriate for everything, as it doesn't get human interaction or other contextual stuff.

Are you up against rapid deadlines or is it just volume?

Are the queries all individual or are some alike?

This isn't exactly true - Both tools can do both depending on if they're integrated into your work systems. Claude is a superior model, but depending on the version of Copilot you have, you can actually use the Claude model within Copilot.

Regardless, AI is a gamechanger. Just make sure that you read your IT policy on AI usage. We only allow folks to use AI tools for work purposes if we have a Data agreement with that company. Otherwise the models are being trained on your company's and your client's data.

For meetings you have with those companies the best tool is ‘Granola’. I love it. It’s transcripts all of your calls and provides you a chat function within the transcript so you can ask any questions across the whole call:

”summarise this call”
“tell me what company X thought about Y”
”did they seem hesitant over X”

It analyses the whole thing and then can provide your write ups to put out. If you forget what’s been discussed it reminds you.

It gives you a note taking facility too and then when you ask it questions it reviews the transcript and your notes. The notes become continual.

what's impressive is the quality - a lot better than copilot.

It is free.

I don't think that I could use copilot to draft my replies because often I'm being asked to make a decision or to make a judgement or a recommendation on the situation in the emails. And often to get to that answer, I'll need more information from the individual. For me, the email draft itself isn't the time consuming but anyway, it's the considering the problem and working out the answer. Drafting an email to say the answer is usually quick and easy.

So if that's the case for you, I think the way I would probably deal with it is essentially to say I'll be available from 2:00 till 4:00 or whatever to deal with matters like this. Please look at my diary which (I make sure I have open to everybody) and then book a slot. And then get people to book 15 minutes in and you just deal with it. I find stuff like that is way easier by phone call.

Copilot !

I second the advice above on checking your company’s data privacy requirements. If you have a Microsoft tenancy, then using copilot is fine and data stays within your organisation control. Claude exports data to the US and needs explicit agreement with your company to ensure you are operating within U.K. data retention periods.

Most companies will have VERY strict rules on use of unapproved AI tools. The risk is huge!

Do you have any FAQ’s or are you repeating yourself a lot? A huge out of office message on permanently with lots of information or links to ‘your’ page with guidance can put people off sending the email or perhaps mean they’ll streamline it a a bit- especially if it’s headed with ‘The current wait time for responses is 5-10 working days. You may find what you’re looking for faster here:….’

I am about to retire from a very complex role, involving much research and drafting. I am never very impressed with copilot, etc, which I don't think picks up nuance, or constructs a response to engineer what one needs, either operationally or strategically.

I know when a response has gone through AI and it is rarely high quality and often it does not address the important and nuanced issues.

In my view, the more research and drafting a person does, the faster complex responses come, and unless people.do it, they will never learn. AI is not for complex or high risk issues.

I always work from the top of my inbox. Delete what is dross/sales, flag what is interesting but not urgent whether it requires a response or not. Acknowledge anything more important and move to a WIP folder. Forward anything someone else should be dealing with. Delete anything I'm cc'd into and owned by someone else. **anything from a key stakeholder: CEO, COO, Exec Team, dealt with as soon as poss, even if with a, "got your msg, have to submit a response to x by 4, will deal with when done".

If I miss something and it's important, other senders can write again.

You need to get organised with mail rules, tagging and colour coding to strat with.

Then I would have some kind of template repository.

Then I would block out time to deal with emails and rheir replies and block out time where you dont even look at your emails. So one way would be core hours. 9-10. The initial sift. Get rid of easy to answer or non-emails. Leaving only the ones that require your reply.

2-3 is complex email replies. 4.30-5 is another sweep to get rid of the easy ones again.

There are other ways to manage your time and you can experiment. But one mistake I find is having your emails always open!

I find working offline for a few hours helps me mentally when workload is getting in top of me. It stops new emails and notifications coming in and distracting me. It gives me the effect of ‘making a dent’ of course till you go back on line and everything sends/receives again, but I do feel like it helps a little in the moment get through some stuff

Agreed. It's utterly unhinged.

Set up your outlook with rules to automatically file things if you don’t have time?

Caseworker is difficult. I am also in an advice-type role, and template replies that can be amended to suit are helpful. The nature of casework is that not every reply will be long and laborious but for ones where it is, having a generic template saves some time. What you do not want to do though is rely on AI or templates to be correct for everyone, you still need to check your answers confirm to individual circumstance.

If it's free - it's mining your data.

OP should be so careful about using free software to transcribe work meetings - any thing confidential being said is being mined, there's GDPR issues, so much can go wrong... For work, you really need to only use approved AI.

1/ unsubscribe from shite
2/ throw other people under the bus "that's really thoughtful idea, Sandra might be interested in this so I've copied her in to see if she wants to take it forward, feel free to remove me from the chain"
3/ dictate responses into AI.

Agree with co-pilot, you can also ask it to look at previous responses as I'm guessing there are some trends with what you get asked

Copilot can definitely analyse the emails you are getting and identify key themes, issues, responses.
You may not want to use it to write the emails immediately but if there is a common misunderstanding that's causing a lot of issues for example it can flag that up and you can tackle it by doing some FAQa, internal comms, internal webinar.

My email organisation is so awful that I crash co-pilot. It can never find anything for me or action much. The power of a scatty mind, to take down the AI overlords!

Not necessarily. Granola doesn’t store audio recording it simply transcribes in real time to store locally. By default it anonymises data for training their own models but never for third parties. Is SOC2 and GDPR compliant. The ability for granola to use anything at all anonymised can be disabled also so it is private and local to your machine only. Furthermore it has flexibility to delete transcripts after a defined period.

As a general rule though people should look at privacy and security of any AI tooling. An effective company will also have AI governance to prevent Shadow AI.

What is the root problem you are trying to solve?

Yes there are multiple AI tools of commercial quality, each has different strengths and weaknesses - we use multiple variants partly for dogfooding solutions but also because their strengths vary. However take good note of pp - do not use anything for work which is not licensed and approved by both cyber and data compliance, especially if you work for third parties.

There are Outlook rules you can set to eg send corporate adverts to a dedicated file for later reading, lower priority stuff similar. You can create rules for keywords to identify priority issues or senders.

However if you want to solve the problem you are more likely to succeed if you can break down the problem - an unmanageable inbox is a symptom rather than the problem. Do you have work well organised and structured in your workplace, are you part of a team working collaboratively and at maximum effect, are there mails which a junior or assistant should be picking up and drafting responses?

Solve the root and the symptoms will disappear, with or without supplementary tools.

Would talking make it easier? Xx