In my experience as a manager, delegation is the easy part. Follow-up is the hard part. This is particularly true when it comes to e-mail.

I’m afraid that in the race to get through the scores of messages that daily hit our inbox, we hit the proverbial ball over the net, but never really follow-up to see what happened when the ball arrives in the other person’s court.

Was it hit back? Was it tossed to someone else? Or, did it just hit the court and lay there with a hundred other balls. If it was the latter, then you really didn’t accomplish anything.

The most unproductive thing you can do when it comes to e-mail is to read the same messages over and over again. This has the effect of doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your workload.

Instead, you should read each message once, then decide what to do with it. Read-decide. Read-decide. This is the pattern of effective e-mail processing. The goal is to end up with an empty inbox daily or, at the very least, every couple of days.

According to author David Allen (Getting Things Done), you need to first decide if the message is actionable. There are only two possible responses to this: yes or no. If the answer is no, it is a Non-Actionable Message. You then have three possible choices:

I don’t know about you, but I currently receive over 100 e-mail messages a day. Some of my colleagues get more. Some get less. Nevertheless, almost everyone I know complains about e-mail overload.

Regardless of how many messages you receive a day, my experience is that most people have a couple of thousand messages sitting in their inbox at any one time. They may have read—and reread—most of them. They may have some that are still unread.

As a result, several times a day, they sit staring at a very long, unruly list of messages. They hardly know where to begin. This results in feelings of anxiety, frustration, and, sometimes, even despair. In short, e-mail overload.