This guest post was originally published by Tracey Lawton at Business Success Strategies.
When I asked my subscribers recently what their biggest office headache is, email is right up there with the rest of them! Comments such as:
“Emails – yikes!”
“Responding to emails”
“Managing email”
“Email overload”
Sound familiar?
Technology is a wonderful thing – it allows us to work virtually, from anywhere in the world, and makes our lives easier. However, it can also hinder us, and this is particularly true in the case of emails.
Every day we are bombarded with hundreds of emails, only a small percentage of which are necessary. Spam filters are great at filtering most of the unwanted emails but a small amount do get through, adding to the number we have to sift through!
We can spend hours each day checking, sorting, and reading our emails only to find we haven’t the time left for actual work!
By cleaning up the flow of emails into your Inbox, you can then improve the flow of your business, and spend your time productively!
Here are my top five tips for managing email so you can be more productive and get some sanity in your business:
- Emails aren’t urgent! Don’t feel you have to read an act upon your email the second it hits your inbox. You don’t! It isn’t urgent. If there was a real emergency then your client/colleague/friend would call you.
- Are all those newsletters you subscribe to really necessary? Probably not! If this the case spend some time going through them and unsubscribing the ones you don’t really want or read.
- Does your email play distracting alerts i.e. a sound? If so, disable it. This is a distraction and you could quite easily stop what you’re working on to go and check your emails. It will then take you some time to get back on track again, not to mention the amount of time you’ve just lost stopping what you were doing, reading your emails, and actioning them.
- Schedule set times to check your emails. Once or twice a day is enough, say first thing in the morning and again later in the day. If you subscribe to various industry groups save reading these emails until you take a break from your work – maybe at the end of the day when you’re winding down. You can easily get sidetracked reading all the different topics and replying to them, all of which is taking you away from your paid work.
- Utilize email filtering tools. Set up folders and filters so that your email gets sent to the appropriate folder as soon as it arrives. Don’t know how to do this? Read my article Outlook Tip: Create Rules and Folders for Simple Email Management or Gmail Email Management: Create Filters & Labels for Quick and Easy Email Organization.
If you follow these 5 tips above, you will find you are spending less time worrying about and checking your emails, and more time on being productive! That has got to be better for your bottom line.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net