Wrangling your emails: Invites and CCs

Meeting invites; CCs

In my previous post, I went to great lengths to persuade us that not all emails are equal – today we’ll put this philosophy into practice to simplify our lives.

Initially, we’ll look at two email types – on the opposite end of the ‘urgency’ spectrum – on the one end is a meeting invite whilst an email where you are CCed is on the other.

The rationale is that a meeting invite could be for a session in an hour from now and needs an urgent response (bad practice I know but it happens), whereas an email where you are CCed by definition means that you don’t need to act on this urgently.

Practically, you should create separate folders for each of these types …. I use the terminology “Inbox-CC” and “Inbox-Meetings”. The magic is done by setting up rules that interrogate each email as they enter your inbox and then move them into the respective folders.

It’s beyond the scope of this article to discuss how to set this up – suffice it to say that all major email platforms (Outlook, Gmail, etc) will have rules/automations that can be applied to new email.

Once you have these automations humming along, you can prioritise reading emails in the Meetings folder – and take your time with those in the CC folder.