Strategies To Review Unread Emails After An Extended Absence

Pro: It's the fairest. First come, first serve.

Con: I can't react to emails as I read them, as there may be replies that update the information relevant to the situation. The situation might be resolved by now.

Pro: I'm always reading the most up-to-date information, and my inbox is already sorted this way.

Con: If I react to any email I read before completing the review, I end up postponing items that are already getting old and stale.

This is what I ended up going with. I sorted by the sender and knowing which of my colleagues generally need my attention the most, I had a pretty good idea of what I would need to be delivering the rest of the week with a good idea of what should be prioritized first.

I also got to skip automated promotional emails until I had a handle on what was being expected of me. The con is that maybe I showed some preferential treatment this way.

This would allow some filtering to let me skip the automated newsletters, etc. while being more fair to colleagues.

I don't usually get too many emails with the urgent flag marked, but if I did, obviously filtering on that status and addressing those first would be ideal.

Somewhat labour intensive and would probably delay actually reading the incoming messages.

Bad idea, but so is procrastinating, and we all do that sometimes.