Email protocols

I used to be a slave to the machine that went bing. A noise or pop-upscreen would notify me of a new message and like Pavlov's dog I'd raceto my in box, read and respond quickly. I thought I was getting thingsdone quickly and thus efficiently. How wrong was I? Very wrong. Andit appears several people I know, plus many that I listen to and read via podcast and blog respectively, have come to the same conclusion. By responding quickly and occasionally initiating an email war I was wasting large amounts of time as I had to stop and start what I was already working on.

There was a big change at work early this year, the government department I work for has been chopped up, repackage and rebranded.  Part of the change involved me being moved from one network to another where I would be dealing with a fresh install of Outlook. This was an opportunity to introduce all the changes to email that I had experimented with on the previous work machine, but hadn't bedded down properly.
This is how I deal with email at work:

• Scheduled email to 3 half hour appointments per day (first thing, lunch and end of day) - I do not check or respond to email outside of these times, any excess is left to the next session.


• Rules move all email where I'm not in the "To" field to a "CC" folder and email from friends (as checked against a friends group in my contacts) to a "Friends" folder and forwarded to a personal email address - this way I only deal with work emails that are sent to me directly (I check the CC once every few days).


• I draft responses during one session and send in the next - thisforces some time to consider the language being used because as aregulator my words can carry more force than intended (this has reducedthe email wars considerably).

There are the occasional exceptions. An emergency breaks out and I need to "live" in the inbox for the "real time" updates, but after the emergency I get back into the routine described above.
An unexpected consequence of the change in my personal email protocols is my email load has reduced, as those who were using my for a quick answer to a question have now learnt they will wait a while, so they must be trying someone else.