This is Stevea Robbins. Welcome to the get-it-done guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Email. I just love email. No, no I don't. I hate email. Actually, my current definition of rich is having enough money that I can hire people to handle all of my email, and I never have to touch a computer again. Been there, done that. If you want to make your email a supportive, carefree

part of your life, like cat pictures or fluffy feather pillows or politicians, let's explore

how you can do that. One, throw away vacation email. There's nothing like going on vacation

to take you out of the stress of daily work, and there's nothing like coming back to an inbox of 23,917 messages to send your cortisone levels back through the roof. Before you leave on vacation, turn on your vacation auto response message, set it to say, I am on vacation. I'll be back on January 10th and will immediately delete my email backlog, unread.

This is necessary for my sanity, and if your message is important, please resend it then.

And then actually do that.

You'll find that rather than being annoyed, most people will admire you for protecting your boundaries

and not getting overloaded, and they'll say, oh my gosh, I wish I had the

courage to do that. And then you can smirk. And people with important messages will actually

resend them when you get back. Two, catch up using only the most recent email from each

thread. Of course, Jordan, that annoyingly perky new hire in the next cubicle, will ignore your

vacation message, and you will be included in a 93-message-long email thread about people

bringing their cats to work.

Great!

When you get back, delete all of the messages in the thread except the most recent one.

99.99% of the time people reply to a thread and they include all the previous messages.

So to catch up,

you just need to read the most recent message from bottom to top. And then you'll be up to speed,

lickety split. You'll be ready to propose the perfect policy. See what I did there?

Three, do not use reply all. Reply all replies to everyone who received the same message you did.

Jordan listed 18 recipients.

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