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!

Are you of a seniority where you could justify PA / admin support?

Create an AI bot to do it for you. It’s actually really easy and straightforward to do and the more detail you can put into the prompt the better and be hyper specific. That will be a game changer for you and help your efficiency

Work on the urgent, then the important, & then the interesting which are neither urgent nor important. You’ll get there.

Claude will help you. And it will remember drafts or categorise them to refer back to.

I absolutely hate when my colleagues send me ai emails. You can tell. I wish they would just send me the brief bullet pointed version that they had before they fluffed it out, saves me time reading 400 extra words. I have a "touch it once" apprpach to my emails. I will not open my emails while I am doing another task. I will time block a set amount of time each day to answer emails. In that blocked out time I will not let myself do anything else, and I will open emails oldest to newest, and will fully deal with each one before opening the next. I delete once dealt with, i don't need to file someones query, if they reply it will show my reply and it's all saved in my sent folder anyway. This method means I spend the minimim amount of time required dealing with emails as i don't read them multiple times or waste time worrying or thinking about them before actually dealing with them, and it is transparent to myself and my managers how much time it is taking up. Then I can have a conversation about whether they value the rest of my job more or the time spent on enails more and if they want me to stay on top of my emails i can ask them what else I want to drop.
Also consider putting an auto reply on, something like "it may take me a week to respond to your email due to the high volume of complex email queries I am currently recieving" as outlook flags when you have autoreplies on before they send an email it will put some people off. Also the slower you are at replying the less people will rely on your brain over using their own or trying someone else. If you are quick people will think you have time and send you more as they think of you as easy to get hold of by email. Think of an experienced colleague who you avoid emailing because they always take 3 weeks to reply if at all, and channel that! You could also add a line into your signature at the top saying "apologies if my email is brief or written in notes/shorthand format, due to time pressures and the volume of complex queries I currently recieve by email, this allows me to reply to as many people as possible within my limited working hours"

Copilot is your friend (think deeper!). I put what I want to say in layman's terms and it writes the most eloquent of detailed replies - it knows what to do more than I do!

Automatic reply to manage expectations

Unless it specifically must be a written response, arranging a quick follow up phone or Teams call is usually a better, more efficient way of dealing with complex issues.

I think you have to be careful with AI generated responses. Some people are more sensitive to them and find them very alienating as they lack humanity.

You have a workload problem, not an email problem.

You may also have an information management problem. How many of these complex replies involve similar questions that need the same answer? Could you create a knowledge base that you can refer people to?

Worry less about organising your archive. This is what Outlook's search function is for.

Copilot is fine to use as it's in your Microsoft tenancy, but don't use any other Large Language Model (that's "AI" to most people) without getting written permission from both your Information Governance and IT people. You won't have the authority to set up a data sharing agreement on behalf of your employer, and GDPR requires one.

Also, are you part of a team that answers these questions? You should use a ticket system, not email. If you must use email, use a shared mailbox. These questions shouldn't be in your personal mailbox in case you leave or go absent for a long time.

You can also ask copilot to scan your inbox and tell you which ones you haven’t responded to, which are urgent etc

For individual emails .. dictate or type a quick summary into copilot .. so it has the gist and ask it to be more creative and professional .. then voila .. read the response, make sure it's correct and Bob's your uncle! .. job done (lifesaver for me!!! .. plus copilot makes me sound nicer!! 😂)

For inbox start of the week, there is a way to summarise emails and prioritise with a copilot prompt.. this i haven't quite mastered fully with my own prompt but I have seen it done and it appears helpful

Good luck!

To add to this .. never put anything commercially sensitive if using ai, Google lens etc. With a large company, they would most likely have a contract with Microsoft so is less of an issue as I think (??) Microsoft are ok with UK gdpr rules, whereas Google didn't sign up to it.

I also have a 'sort of' template list saved of responses too so this is spot in if you can apply to your workload.

Is your role predominantly email based, or does it interrupt other tasks? A previous boss once advised me that I don't need to reply to emails immediately. Unless you have an SLA, consider keeping your inbox closed for the first hour of your day, then set aside focused time to go in and do some replying.

Is providing this complex advice by email a key part of your job? If so then you need to set up an email management system eg flags or folders for different levels of priority. If the emails are a by product of the rest of your work, can you reply suggesting a call instead. The trouble with email is that a reply can generate a further message and a lot of back and forth. Or can you prepare some template answers with bullet points that you can adjust accordingly to the circumstances.

Do you use co-pilot or another?
I’m always wary of using anything outwith Co-pilot for emails as it’s been drummed into us for security reasons. I’d love to be able to do this though!

I flag things with a date so I don't forget, and in many cases I prioritise. Is this a "nice to have" opinion from me? Or is it a "mission critical" thing that will sink the organisation if it goes wrong?

If its the latter, I mark it as red in "categories". If the former, it can be orange or yellow, or even green, depending on how much I perceive it to be down to me to resolve the issue.

More often than not, the issues marked amber yellow or green are resolved before I come back to them.

PS I'm a perfectionist workaholic rentagob, so I had to do something or I'd have drowned. I learned that not everyone treats an unreplied email as a ticking bomb waiting to go off (like I did)

Abdolutely AI. Teach it from your previous replies. Is every email really different? You can still teach it to reason what the answer might be. Then you have a draft. But crucially, if you are drowning that's an org issue, not yours, they need to hire or work out how to manage your workload better. Are you paid 9-5? Start keeping to those hours if so, don't make an the company's problem your problem.

I use the codex part of ChatGPT for this. If you are linking to things etc it can automatically do that. I’m currently working with 41 stakeholders and I’m not sure how I’d have done it without it.

I do make sure it drafts rather than sends. So I’m working in my drafts folder mostly. Or it puts it in the thread/chat and I can send it from there. It can read my emails, drives, calendar etc so can see who has asked, answered, booked etc.

And the more you use it the better it gets.

it sends me a summary every morning on Slack or what’s a priority and it’s massively increased my capacity to get to what’s important quickly.

Yes, definitely be careful about exactly what data you are giving AI and what your employer’s policy is - AI tools are as leaky as sieves and even their creators are too incompetent to control them when supposedly testing them in “controlled conditions.” Sharing confidential data with the outside world isn’t the best way to protect a job or a company’s reputation.

In fact, I think people have collectively lost their minds on AI, literally and figuratively - it starts as a means to steal all your secrets and ends as a way of making you feel (and ultimately become) incompetent. “Ooh, it knows better what to say than I do!” 🧐

Learn to use Tasks in outlook. It’s the -tick icon on the side bar.
You can flag emails, make yourself a list for the day from the flagged emails (it auto pulls the flagged emails into a list). Tick things off that are complete. Click straight through to the flagged email.

For complex queries,

Hit reply early on,

copy the email into the response area and chunk it out into the individual asks. Then you can turn it into a digestable request.

For outlook skills - find a good P.A. or team admin type person and ask for some coaching from them.

Inbox, and then two categories - basically red and green. Once you have dealt with an email categorise it green. Red is for complex or longer term stuff. Aim to categorise everything, and sort (and collapse) by category so you only need to look at the uncategorised stuff.

So many people on MN talk about "blasting through" all their emails - as if they need a cursory glance at best - when, for a lot of us, each email is a core task that actually needs work to be done to fulfil it.

No need to "file" as such in a lot of cases - although that does require you to rely on search facilities later.

Have you other work assigned to you also and are thesee email requests competing with your capacity for your other work ? If so you should have a conversation with your manager. Maybe you need a means for these requests to be entered with a front door process and trained appropriately.
Maybe some are more urgent than others and maybe some can wait. Maybe the less urgent ones can be answered by someone more junior or copilot used as others have said....