Prioritizing and Scheduling Email Processing: an Application of the Capacitated Lot Sizing Problem

Processing emails is a major part of the work being performed by today’s knowledge worker in a service economy. This paper presents a heuristic model to prioritize and schedule email processing for a knowledge worker. We adapt a multi-item capacitated production planning model to present an analytical model of email prioritization and scheduling. Assuming we have emails with different priorities, we address the problem of how often we should check emails and how much email of each priority we should process in each period. Our model determines a time allocation for the email time of a knowledge worker.