Email is Active, Never Passive

It is my great pleasure to tell my teenage and young adult clients that I was a full grown adult before I got my first email address. It was also around the time I first experienced the Internet. It was the early 90's, and I was a college Freshman and the school needed a way to communicate with me in an efficient but professional way.

It turns out that email was not a fad, but is here to stay. We have had many communication iterations in that time, but email, like the US Mail, is an institution. If you don't have the pleasure of training the next generation of workers you might not have the rhetoric to explain why a 16-year-old should work on his or her emailing skills. After all, email is the way their grandparents keep trying to communicate with them even though they tell their grandparents over and over that, "I don't check that account. It's a spam account for when I want to sign up for something."

The "terrible" truth is that email is the main way the work world communicates. Like it or not, if you want a job you're going to have to check your email daily and get good at drafting emails. Email accounts have also become a way we organize communication. I will often tell people to email me instead of voicemail or text because my emails keep a record of who I need to communicate with right in front of me.

For some people email is the opposite. It is mainly where communication goes to die. I talk to many people that didn't get a job interview because they never check their email. Many that tell me this with a tone that says, "Only old people check their email." I confirm that only employed people check their email.

To that end I have proposed to people that they take steps to move email from the passive to the active category in their mind. One strategy I suggest is that they check their email every day with an aim to do something with every unread email in their inbox. I have come up with a couple of general categories for reference:

• Answer. Ideally, all emails from a person should be acknowledged and deserve a reply. To retire an email (delete, put in a folder or otherwise get it out of the inbox), respond to it.

• Delete. Some are junk or information which may be interesting but not relevant or pressing.

• Unsubscribe. Junk email is the number one reason people tell me they don't check their email, or even abandon whole accounts. With people who have 10K unopened emails I recommend unsubscribing from 10 a day. It takes about two weeks to get the flow of new junk emails under control.

• File. I don't like filing emails because for most people it's the same as putting it in the trash. However, there might be some you need to keep just in case. These I clean out monthly or yearly.

• Mark as Unread. If an email needs a response but I don't have the time to do it right now, I recommend marking it as unread so that you must come back to it the next time you check your email.

I recommend checking email at least daily and committing to managing every email that has come through in the last 24 hours. People must actively check and manage their email for email to work. Otherwise, job offers just get lost in abandoned accounts.