10 Email Management Tips to Save Time-Take control of your Inbox with these 10 email management tips.Email is one of those time savers that makes one wonder "How did we ever do without?". But if not managed well email can reduce your productivity! Did you know that:
These are amazing facts that speak to the importance of taking control of the Inbox before the Inbox takes control of you. Here we prove 10 email management tips to take control of your Inbox before it takes control of you. 1. Batch your email and do not check in betweenWhile much of time management is about breaking things down, managing the email is about chunking things together. Research shows that if you check email constantly then you spend more time on email. On top of this there is the added loss in concentration. When working with clients, batching emails is one of the hardest things to do. Why? Because they are used to having the email open constantly. For many the email is their default window on the computer. See why batching emails times is important in how to use email. 2. Don't procrastinate: Practice the one-touch one-decision ruleI love the one-touch one-decision rule. For me it is one of those 'aha' moments when working with David Allen's approach. If you butterfly across emails, and find yourself re-reading emails without any action, then the one-touch one-decision rule is for you. See how you can apply the one-touch one decision rule to:
3. Take off the email notificationAre you responding like a Pavlovian subject to your email notification? Being notified that an email has arrived shatters your concentration and harms your productivity. Lets take a popular example that you may identify with. Imagine you are sitting at your desk. You are concentrating on an important task and today is the deadline. You are under pressure only to have a pop-up window notify that "you have mail". You try to ignore this, and get on with the important task, but it continues to be in your mind. Is it important? Who is it from? Finally you put down your important task and check. More often than not it is an unimportant message, such as SPAM. This scenario illustrates how email can shatter your concentration on the job and divert you from your goals and current priorities. It will probably take another 5 minutes to get back to the same levels of concentration. If you use Microsoft Outlook, here are the steps to turn off your email alerts. 4. Don’t reinvent the wheel - use templates for regular responses.At university I get plenty of emails from students that are asking many similar questions.To manage these similar questions I set up a mail template to answer the standard replies. I don’t have to draft an email from scratch but rather use my email template and customize it for the person and the situation. Now you don’t have to continually re-invent the wheel. 5. Make your subject line clear to the recipient.People scan their inbox by subject. Make sure that your subject line is relevant. The subject line should give the email recipient enough information on the content of the email, which should be clear and concise. Check out these email etiquette tips for effective email management. 6. Use email filters.Good email management means that you need to use email filters. Set up filters to save you time. You can set up filters in your email program so that SPAM is sent to a SPAM folder. Periodically, quickly scan this spam folder for messages that the filter has mistakenly put there. The same came be done for CC's. It is an easy process to set up a CC folder and automatically send all CC emails to this folder. Just don't forget to check the CC folder. 7. Take your email to zero and keep it there.Good email management is really about changing email habits. I do plenty of work with people and email habits and one thing that stands out is that many people haven't been taught best practices for keeping their email under control. Many people I work with fall into the trap of using their email as a to-do list and as a holding place for major project items. I remember working with one executive who had over 8,000 emails in their Inbox! Getting your emails to zero each day reduces your stress and feelings of overload. But it is habit that you need to adopt. Use a version of the two minute rule for good email management and get your email to zero. 8. Use email folders...or not?If you use email folders then make sure, for good email management, that you use email folders that make intuitive sense to you. Filing messages into your folder is a productivity tool that can save you time. But if you are using your email messages as your to-do list - which you shouldn't be - then it can take longer. Why? A study by IBM found that people spend 58 seconds going through their folders to find a message, compared to 17 seconds using the email search function. Of course if you have good email filters then this could aid folder set up and retrieval The flip side to this is that the search capability in Gmail and Microsoft Outlook 2010 are already very good. See this article Am I wasting my time organizing email? 9. Use an effective email signature.If you are looking to save time then an email signature could be for you. An email signature means that you don't have to keep typing your name or contact details below each message that you send. Here are some tips to set an effective email signature. 10. Learn how to use keyboard shortcuts.Keyboard shortcuts can dramatically reduce your time on email. Here is a cheat-sheet with all the keyboard shortcuts for Gmail. Here is a cheat-sheet with all the keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Outlook.
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