Are you truly handling your email, or is your email handling you? According to a recent survey "What is Robbing You of Your Time? 15 Very Busy Professionals Weigh In", 7 out of 15 people feel like the email dragon is getting in the way of their productivity.
Below are our tips to help you start your process of addressing your email so that it doesn’t run your life.
Here we go:
1. Set aside time to get to know your email program. You will more than likely find 8-10 ways to reduce and organize your email in a better way.
2. Keep your email conversation to a maximum of 3 exchanges. On the 4th exchange, pick up the phone and call the person to resolve the issue straight away. Keep your time on the phone limited.
3. Opt out of any newsletter you are not reading. Many people just end up putting those newsletters and articles into a folder that will never be read or viewed again. Either read the article as it comes into your inbox or ditch it.
4. Check emails 3 times per day - at 9 am, 12pm and at 4pm. Then, leave it alone. Checking your email all day long is one of the most inefficient uses of time, and it can be a distraction in your day.
5. Watch out for distractions! You know what I mean. You open an email that takes you to a website, you see something interesting, and there you go off again to another website and another....and another.... Suddenly, you've just wasted an hour or two!
6. Keep your emails short and to the point.
7. Respond to people with a quick answer in the subject line of your email.
8. Consider switching your mail program to Google Apps. With Google Apps, you can continue to use yourname@yourdomain.com, while creating labels, reporting mail as spam or telling Google Apps to bypass your inbox and send the mail straight to trash. If you are receiving spam, you can also mark the mail as spam, and it will disappear and automatically go straight to your spam filter.
9. Create filters, folders or groups for quick access. Many email programs already provide the ability for you to choose to have certain emails bypass your inbox and go straight to a particular folder or group. At the end of the day, you can scan that folder for important information. If you have received 3 emails from the same person, answer them all in one email and not in 3.
10. When sending email, create a super specific subject line. It is much easier to find that email later if the subject line has a unique word or phrase in it.
11. Use an online appointment scheduling system that syncs with your calendar to prevent people from contacting you for appointment scheduling.
12. If spam continues coming into your inbox from the same domain or user over and over again, report the abuse using SpamCop.
13. Keep no more than 20 emails in your inbox at one time. Otherwise, anything beyond 20 is again “out of sight”, which means it is “out of mind”. And, another 20, 30, 40 will pile on top of this the next day and the next after that.
14. Do it, ditch it, or delegate it. At the end of the day, your goal should be to have a 100% clean inbox. If not, tomorrow morning, you will have 20, 50 or 200 emails on top of what you never addressed the previous day.
15. Keep the YouTube videos, joke emails and chain letters away. While so many of these are funny and can brighten up your day, they are a distraction. Once again, filter these to a folder called “jokes and videos”. Then look at them when you have free time.
If you still can't get your email under control with these top tips, then maybe it’s time to let the world know that “Hey…I don’t do email. My phone number is _______________ !” |
