As we continue to get overwhelmed by the number of emails we receive on a daily or weekly basis, it is becoming increasingly important that we have a strategy to manage this important communication channel in both our personal and professional lives.

 

These days, email has become a necessary evil. We all need to have at least one: in order to communicate digitally and more efficiently, and to have access to the numerous platforms and services that are available online. For almost every online service we want to use, an email address is necessary – not only as a unique identifier to facilitate access the platform, but also for the platform owner to send you messages and notifications, which may occur several times per day. So, in addition to personal and work-related emails, bill notifications, there is often a deluge of messages from social media platforms, trade publications, and ad hoc mailing lists to name a few.

By the end of the day, many of us have received dozens of email, and if you are juggling multiple accounts – say for your business – the figure easily jumps to hundreds of emails a day. Invariably, it is easy to get overwhelmed but the sheer number of new messages that are demanding your attention, but more importantly, it is also easy to overlook important emails that require your attention. To get a handle on this problem, here are five essential tips to help you manage email inbox more effectively and effectively.

 

1. Allocate specific times to check your inbox

Whether we are prepared to admit it or not, the alerts and notifications that we are receiving on our smartphones, tablet computers and laptops can be quite distracting, and can disrupt our concentration when we need to focus. Moreover, many of us, are already conditioned to check our phones, in particular, as soon as an alert is received, and as a result, increasingly, we are slaves to our devices.

To the extent possible, challenge yourself to allocate specific times during the day to check your email inboxes. All of the inboxes might not need to be checked with the same frequency. For example, personal emails could be checked just once or twice per day, whilst work-related accounts could be checked every two or three hours during work hours. Ultimately, the objective is to batch the reading and responding to emails, which is more efficient and productive way of getting the job done.

 

2. Take action immediately

Having read an email, what do we do afterwards? If it is urgent, we are likely to respond to it right away. For messages that might need a response, but are not urgent, we are likely to choose to act on them at a later date. However, it means that at that later date, we will need to wade through all of our new and old messages to find those that still require our attention.

A better approach is to reply to a message immediately upon opening, instead of having it languish in our inbox. Further, if we have to touch an email multiple times – unless one has to collate information, in order to prepare a detailed reply – it could suggest that we are not operating as efficiently or effectively as we cold be. The key here is to reduce wasteful time and effort, and increase productivity.

 

3. Organize your inbox

When you have 100, or even 20, contiguous unopened email messages, it is easy for your eyes glaze over, and for you to miss important communication that requires your attention and possible action. To better manage this situation, it is recommended that you organise and label messages as soon as they are received.

One of the best ways to jumpstart the organisation process is to use filters. Virtually all of the popular email platforms and software have some kind of filtering capability, which can look out for, among other things, specific email addresses, subject lines, or specific text, and thereafter, take some action, such as to flag, tag, categorise, move to a folder, forward, send an automatic reply, or to delete.

Admittedly, it will take some time to understand the types of emails you are receiving, to get a sense of how best to organise them, and to implement the desired system. However, in automating management of your emails – and not just doing it manually and inconsistently (when you feel like it or remember) will help you to filter out the ‘noise’ in your inbox, and allow you to truly focus on the items that truly deserve your attention.

 

4. Clean up your inbox

Although this point goes without saying, many of us are not as ruthless as we could be – especially when it comes to unread messages, and those that have no true or longstanding value to us.

With regard to unread messages, it is likely that if they are over 14 days old, you could possibly delete them without incident. If some of them ought to be kept for the record, either move them out of your inbox, or save a copy to your hard drive and delete it from your inbox. For messages that have no true or longstanding value, such social media and notifications and Amazon promotions, frequently, the challenge is just being consistent with deleting those messages. However, once again, some of these actions can be automated. For example, those messages can be deleted immediately, or deleted after X days, or moved out of your inbox and deleted manually at a later date.

 

5. Unsubscribe from unwanted subscriptions and promotional emails

Once again, this activity requires vigilance: to unsubscribe from newsletters or ads in which you have no real interest, or that you have no time to read. These days, whenever we take a quiz, want to download a free document/e-book, or to access a specific sites, we need to share our email address, and get automatically registered to the platform’s mailing list. After a while, we may even forget how and why we are receiving such emails, and just leave them unopened in our inbox.

These types of emails are just clutter, and can cause you not only to waste time, but also not be able to quickly identify the messages that you actually need to read. So, if you have several unopened messages from emails subscriptions, or there are emails from subscriptions that you repeatedly delete without truly reading their content, just bite the bullet and unsubscribe.

 

 

Image credit: Gerd Altmann (Pixabay) 

————–