How to Tackle Work Emails After the Holiday: Methods and Tools
After the holidays, your inbox turns into a mess: hundreds of emails, and truly important ones might get lost.
Let's explore how professionals and managers can quickly organize their inbox and avoid spending a week reviewing everything manually.
Why Post-Holiday Inbox Turns Into a Chaos
After the holidays, employees often open their inboxes feeling like they've received every task in the company's history. Some coworkers or clients sent reports just in case, others sent reminders, and there were plenty of holiday greetings.
On the first day back, the situation escalates: colleagues start sending urgent tasks, partners remind you of unresolved issues, and clients demand immediate responses. The regular rhythm hasn't returned, and in this context, these emails feel like a huge stress.
The Result:
Employees spend the first hours opening emails haphazardly, getting caught up in details and spending hours on sorting out the inbox.
Initial Sorting: How to Quickly Separate the Important from the Trivial
The secret to surviving the email chaos is not to attempt reading everything immediately. It's important to sort emails into important and non-important categories at the start. This doesn't take much time but saves hours and nerves.
Sorting by Sender
A simple trick: first, look at who the email is from. Give top priority to management, key clients, and strategic partners. Even if the subject seems minor, these categories always come first.
The second tier includes team members and related departments. The third tier consists of newsletters, service notifications, and email copies where you're obviously not the primary recipient.
This order immediately sets the right focus: critical issues don't get lost amidst greetings and reminders.
Filtering by Topics
Set content filters. Modern email services allow quick searches and sorting by keywords.
For example: "urgent," "report," "approval." These tags help bring to the forefront what needs action now and can set aside background emails.
A good practice is to create temporary folders:
- Important Today
- This Week
- Review Later
Immediately sort the incoming emails. This transforms your inbox from a chaotic list into a manageable tool.
Quick Decisions Method
When tackling post-holiday emails, it's easy to get bogged down in details: read an email, think about it, pause, and return later. Ultimately after an hour, you've processed five emails, while dozens still wait. The "quick decisions" method helps break this loop.
If a response or action takes less than two minutes, do it right away.
Don't postpone short replies, simple forwards, or deleting unnecessary newsletters. This habit drastically reduces outstanding tasks and relieves the mental load of remembering.
For recurring emails, templates come to the rescue. HR can keep ready responses like "Thank you, we've received your resume, and we'll get back to you within a week."
For project managers, something like "Noted, we'll discuss at Thursday's meeting" works well. Even a few such templates save hours each month and reduce the reluctance towards tedious replies.
Ready-Made Phrases
Even a simple email can get stuck if you start crafting responses from scratch. To save time, keep a list of universal phrases handy that fit various situations. They're short, polite, and provide the recipient with a clear understanding that their message is noted.
Examples:
- "Thanks, I'll get back to you by the end of the day."
- "Got it, I'll add it to the plan."
- "I'll clarify details and respond tomorrow."
- "Information is useful, added it to Slack."
Such phrases create a sense of control and transparency: you're not committed to solving the task immediately but show that the email is processed and the person will receive a response. When message flow is at its peak, this alleviates tension for both the sender and yourself.
How Not to Drown in Emails Again
Sorting through post-holiday emails once is half the battle. It's more important not to let them turn into chaos again. One effective practice is to set fixed time for checking emails. For instance, 30 minutes in the morning and another 20 minutes in the afternoon. When emails have a dedicated time slot in your calendar, they stop stretching throughout the day and stealing time from actual tasks.
Adopt the rule "Inbox is not a storage."
Instead of keeping hundreds of emails, create an "Urgent" folder. Anything that requires action goes there, leaving inbox for new messages. This method reduces anxiety: your inbox always looks clean, and work tasks are consolidated in one place.
Another method is to clean up on the go. From your phone, while commuting or during a break, you can easily delete newsletters, star important emails, or move them to the appropriate folder right away. This doesn’t replace a full review but significantly reduces clutter and saves time at the beginning of the workday.
Alternatives to Email: When It Can Be Replaced
Some chaos stems not from the number of emails but from employees using email for unintended purposes. Sometimes it's easier to abandon emails altogether in favor of other channels.
For instance, within teams everyday questions are more efficiently resolved through messaging apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Conversations are more dynamic, and history is preserved without attachments and unnecessary copies.
For client interactions CRM systems are more suitable. They record agreements, deadlines, and documents in one place, rather than scattered across email threads. This reduces the risk of losing an important file or missing a deadline.
Even a simple internal database or shared chat can eliminate dozens of emails a day. Instead of endless resending, keep documents and instructions in Google Drive or Dropbox. It’s faster and more reliable than hoping the needed email can be found through a search.
Conclusion
Email overload after the holidays isn't unavoidable. With the right strategy, you can clear your inbox in 1–2 days and set up systems to prevent chaos from recurring.
