Email

The book I read to research this post was Brilliant Email by Dr Monica Seeley which is an excellent book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. This book is mostly about handling emails in an efficient way, it recommends not checking your emails more than 5 times a day and ideally 1 or 2 times. It also suggests having a chat with your boss and getting him to prioritize your work and also if something is urgent get people to phone you, it is a more efficient use of your time. Believe it or not there is an actual illness called email addiction and many employees check their business email account while on holiday, with some it gets to be a problem and they even hide from families to access email. This book suggests deleting unwanted or unimportant emails. You do find men tend to be better at doing this than women who tend to be hoarders. Many email accounts have a overall space limit for emails  and so it makes a lot of sense to delete any unwanted stuff. There are email archiving services and software such as mimecast worth considering. A couple of books recommended and which I will try to read are The Tyranny Of Email & The Myth Of The Paperless Office which both look interesting. How many emails do you print out? It's a fallacy the idea of the paperless office and of course look at the wastefulness of all the storage of emails and the power wasted running email devices often unnecessarily. This book looks at the legal aspects of email from a British point of view. Bear in mind email can be used as evidence in court and many people construct an email much more hastily than they would a letter. One bit of advice in the book is if it is on a sensitive subject construct a letter on paper and then copy it out as an email. Of course generally if someone sends you an email with the carbon copy or Cc option they will want you to read it but won't normally need you to reply. If you do need to reply send your message to the sender. I really enjoyed this book and I think you can see it's on a really interesting subject. The Brilliant series tends to be on business and psychological subjects and they are good books and present information in an easy to understand way.