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OHIO can solve inbox overcrowding

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: May 31, 2019

I have never written an article on “the demise of email” because I never thought that it was in demise. And, in fact, it isn’t. According to a study on the website Statista, the number of emails sent worldwide is increasing by 10 billion per day each year. There were 281.1 billion emails sent and received in 2018, and 2019 is projected to see 293.6 billion. That’s a lotta emails, and many of them are in your inbox right now. What do you do with all that?

You could go full Marie Kondo and try to achieve “inbox zero.” That’s a catchy little phrase, but it doesn’t implicate any specific action to get there.

However, there is an action with the helpful acronym OHIO (at least, helpful for those of us stuck in Ohio).

OHIO stands for “Only Handle it Once.” This doesn’t mean that you look at an email and then never look at it again. When you tell your fixer “handle it” there is always a method.

The operative word here is “handle.” That means that there is a process of putting each individual email in the place within the office document flow that makes the most sense without losing or overusing it.

In the end, each email should be read however many times by however many people are necessary without duplication of effort. Ideally, this would be once per recipient, but nothing is ever ideal, of course. So each email should be read the exact number of times necessary to understand it by each person on the thread. It then needs to be responded to or scheduled for a response immediately.

Then, each email needs to be sent to the right place. This could be to archive it on the email server or inside a platform like Slack, or to deleted it immediately if that is the appropriate action.

While the result here may be a temporary inbox zero, that won’t last. The cumulative effect, and the real result, is that emails get put inside the office flow rather than being something that everyone has to fight.

Give it a shot. Can’t hurt.

Read: https://www.howtogeek.com/411312/forget-inbox-zero-use-ohio-to-triage-your-emails-instead/


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