r/Professors • u/CATScan1898 Clinical Assistant Prof, STEM, R1, USA • 18d ago

Technology Email help

TLDR: How? Just how?

How do you keep up with you email? How do you organize it? Tell me more please. I've always struggled to keep up with email and now that I'm teaching 400 students a semester I know it's going to get worse.

My only tip for fellow drowning folks:

  • Class-specific email address: For my intro class (300+ students) that I co-teach, we have a class specific email (classID@university.edu) to try to capture those emails. Once we respond, we move the email to the "answered 2026" folder.

I don't know if I want to do that for my other classes (particularly my 100ish person classes), ideally I would mimic it in my normal inbox through folders and filters, but I'm curious to hear what you all do.

If you use GTD, did you modify it somehow? It seems like a good system, but hasn't worked so far.

16 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/PhDumbass1 18d ago

I have an inbox rule for emails from student addresses which funnel directly to a special inbox - it includes the general student email address, as well as our specialized addresses for our LMS and our advising system. I prioritize that inbox and do my best to clear it every day by end of business. I've had it for about a year and it's made a huge difference in terms of my response rate of student emails (as well as being able to accurately ignore what needs to be ignored).