An average corporate (Blah! I dislike that word) employee who uses email to contact clients and for in-office exchanges will spend nearly half of the work day responding to or reading emails, stacking up 200 emails either sent or reviewed daily. That’s a lot of wasted time. Because of this, it’s important that email users can deal with their messages quickly without staring at them for too long or figuring out how to sort and manage them.
Filters
Many email services provide email filtering that allows you to sort and organize your emails more readily. This can mean everything from sorting your “immediate reply” emails from your “reference materials,” to throwing emails into the right folders, to forwarding misguided emails to the correct group. For the OCD among us, this is amazing. I know I have about 30 filters setup in my Gmail to make sure I don’t waste time moving and rearranging.
Labels/Folders
Depending on the email hosting you’re using, there will typically be some storage method that keeps all of your emails organized and tucked neatly away. Whatever method you use is fine, but you should follow a couple of basic rules. First, make sure your labels are appropriately descriptive. They should be specific enough that it’s clear where everything goes, but don’t make labels so specific that you find yourself with dozens of folders. Second, you should never, ever delete an email. As soon as you do, you’ll need it. Even free email hosting services provide multiple gigabytes of storage, so deletion is totally unnecessary.
Pre-Constructed Responses
I know this is kind of cheesy, but many of the emails that a corporate employee sends out each day will look and sound very similar. Even having a response directing the email to the appropriate division is useful. For common questions or responses, create and save a pre-formatted response that you can edit over time and modify to meet the needs of the current email.
Follow Ups
One of the best things you can do to reduce your email management problems is be proactive. By scheduling “follow ups” for important emails or blood thirsty clients, you can prevent explosions before they happen. Use your email program cooperatively with a scheduling program to remind yourself of tasks that will require your attention at a future date.
Improve Your Type Speed
According to David Allen, creator of the popular book and seminar on productivity known as “Getting Things Done,” you can save literally years of work just by improving your type speed to 50 words per minute. Whatever your current speed is, learning to type more quickly is sure to decrease your email response time.
Three hundred emails are sent out every second, which means by the time you finish reading this article, nearly 50,000 emails have traveled from one account to another. For someone who answers email as a part of their professional life, handling their share of those emails can be daunting. Fortunately, following productivity tips like the ones listed here can help make that portion of your work day flow more smoothly, increase your overall efficiency, and give you a few more chances throughout your day to stare out the window and just breathe.
replying an e-mail in time very important. Being blogger its the duty to reply in time to build good reputation. Thanks for the awesome post.
All great tips for people with lots of emails. I’m afraid I dont rack up more than 20 emails a day at the most, and I generally deal with them as they come in so I never find myself behind on them….yet
Checking email, reading email and replying email can take hours if you let it. Sooner or later you will see that finding ways to manage them is necessary. However, you don’t have to worry as you have less than 20 emails a day.