Email groups are a great way to keep in touch with like-minded people. You get to learn and share information relevant to your fields, interests, or hobbies. However a side effect of email groups is inbox clutter.
So it’s a natural temptation to change your email group preferences and elect to receive “digests”, instead of individual messages as they’re sent within the group. Digests are compilations of all group activity for the day, and is packaged into one email for easy perusal. Yet this neatness-based feature might actually limit your effectiveness within an email group.
The email inbox doubles as a check list. More often than not, each individual message represents a specific task which needs to be accomplished. That’s why Gmail’s archive feature is a favorite of mine, since it allows me to make messages that I’ve handled disappear from the inbox. The workflow is simple: receive a message, handle the task outlined in it, and archive the message.
Unfortunately, email group digests make this difficult, as I found a few months ago when I opted to receive digests from the b5media business channel mail group. Because the messages were bunched together, it was practically impossible to quickly pull distinct tasks out of them. I found myself basically ignoring the messages and ended up behind the activities within the group.
Once I opted to receive individual messages again, I was able to get back on track. So, as you being your work week fellow freelancers, know that there’s nothing wrong with email groups. Just make sure you participate in them the right way.
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