When school’s out and everyone heads off for their summer holiday, you probably dread coming back to hundreds of emails. The thought of spending the first week dealing with them all and feeling you’re having to catch up all the time. Here are a few ideas to help you deal with your email backlog.

The process for dealing with your holiday backlog is the same as handling large volumes of email on a daily basis, the volume after a few weeks absence is just larger.

Once you’ve planned out the important things you need to get done on your first day back, set aside an hour to go through your inbox. Yes, I know it’s probably going to take much longer than this but it’s just the start.

Don’t respond to any new incoming emails until you have checked what’s already in your Inbox.

First scan – DON’T READ OR RESPOND TO ANY EMAILS ON THIS SCAN. Just go through quickly and eliminate the spam and any email you know you don’t need to read. Use the sort function to sort your email by sender or subject. It makes it easier to identify and delete the junk.

You won’t have time to read everything, so delete anything that doesn’t require your attention or has information you absolutely MUST have. Avoid the temptation to save it ‘just in case’.

Second scan – pick out all the priority emails you need to respond to and place them in a separate ‘Action’ folder, ‘flag’ or highlight them. Apply the two minute rule. If you can respond to them in two minutes or less, do so now. If not, leave them until later.

Set a time in your diary to respond to your ‘Action’ emails – either do this in the first hour, as you should still have time left, or set aside more time later in the day.

Depending on the volume of emails and as long as you haven’t got side-tracked, you should be able to complete the first two scans in the first hour. Do the third scan too if you still have time, otherwise leave your email until the next time you’re scheduled to work on it.

Now you can take a few minutes to look at any new emails – in case there is anything important that needs attention, but I mean a ‘few minutes’. Don’t get distracted!

Third scan – if your filters haven’t already sorted out reading emails, now is the time to place all of these in the appropriate folder(s).

Fourth scan – deal with what’s left. Less urgent action emails can now be dealt with. What’s left? If it’s not action or reading – it’s probably not urgent so can be deleted.

Once you’ve safely dealt with the backlog that came in while you were away – only then, can you deal with applying the same process to the new emails that have come in.

I use different email accounts to organise my email before it even gets to the Inbox and folders. Non-essential newsletters and recent Internet account sign-ups, go to one email address. Postings from discussion groups go to another account. Work related emails and the newsletters I really want to read, go to my main account and then use filters to sort these into folders.

Before you go away reduce the volume of incoming email – switch off any email group notifications or select special notices or admin only.

Check out some of my other articles on dealing with Email Overwhelm or read my blog posts on managing and organising your email.