Email: Don’t Fire & Forget

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I don’t like to be heavily managed.  And therefore, I try not to heavily manage others.

However, I realized that I had a bit of blind spot in trusting folks to follow through on their commitments.  I would send an email requesting an update or a response to a question.  But never receive a response.  And, I wouldn’t realize that for some time.  And, I didn’t have a good process to track these.

So, here’s what I found works for me.

  1. Create a folder called Follow-up.
  1. Create an Outlook rule that moves any message from me to the Follow-up folder.
  1. BCC myself on emails that I want to make sure I get a response on.
  2. Check the Follow-up folder as part of my weekly planning routine.