Section 3A: Handling the Day-to-Day Tasks

Paper Flow

There are two kinds of paper that will flow across your desk (or through your computer): the official Boise State stuff that needs to get taken care of in a timely fashion and the unsolicited mail that comes generically from the outside to the "Chair of Department X."

Official stuff

Some times of the year are busier for chairs than other. The busiest time is often in spring when various end-of-the-year activities need to be planned.

Official Emails

Almost all of the official email that you need to pay attention to will come through email. Some days it will seem that you do nothing except respond to emails. Fortunately, Google Inbox has settings that learn which email addresses are the most important (by frequency of emails from that sender), and Google Mail will mark them with an icon. You can set up multiple inboxes and identify one inbox for those "Important" emails. Routing official emails into inboxes or folders can make a big difference in prioritizing the messages that need your attention the most.

Another strategy for managing faculty email requests is to tell faculty WHEN they should use email vs the phone vs visiting you in your office. Here's an example:

If the matters needs immediate attention, come to my office or call me or my assistant.
If the matter needs to be addressed within a week, make an appointment with me.
If the matter can wait a couple of weeks, email me.

3 Tips for Managing Your Email InboxAs her email inbox hovered around 50 messages, Carrie Gonnella took action. Over the course of a week in January, she whittled away at her inbox, responding to emails, archiving messages and sorting others into folders based on projects until she had zero emails in her inbox. “There’s a weight off me when I’m at inbox zero,” said Gonnella, senior program director for Duke’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship.

Unsolicited mail

Chairs get a lot of snail mail and a ton of email. Anything addressed to the department rather than to an individual will come to you. For snail mail, you can ask a support staff member to do an initial sort, putting into a separate box items that are clearly not time-dependent (book catalogs, program announcements, etc.). Going through this box only once every week or two will save you a bit of time.

Much of the unsolicited mail can be tossed, but some of it will need attention, or at least filing. The latter includes unsolicited letters from individuals seeking to teach in the department. Colleges do not fill regular positions from such letters, but if the person looks at all interesting, it's good to keep the letter on file in case the department suddenly needs a temporary hire. Other potentially useful stuff includes things like brochures or flyers on graduate programs, internship opportunities, events in the region, etc. Have a system for keeping track of this kind of thing-it might be posted on a departmental bulletin board or kept in files for the use of students and advisors.

Managing email is a bit more challenging. See "Tips for Managing Email" (below) for strategies on managing unsolicited emails.