8 Things You Can Do Today to Better Manage Your Email Inbox
How any of us feel about email may depend on the day and the size of our mailbox. It can be an excellent tool for communication, but unfortunately, in many cases, it is also the source of overwhelm and a seemingly endless stream of work. It doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways to manage your inbox and email overall to make it a productive tool for sharing ideas and moving work forward.Here are eight things you can do that will make your email inbox less the enemy and more the tool you wished it would be.
Have a daily routine and plan
It is very easy to allow your email and your inbox to rule your schedule and dictate your efforts. If you are looking at your email so many times in a day that you cannot keep track, you likely need to take a step back and realign how you are using it. One of the best ways to manage the time spent in email is to have a routine and plan for how you handle email. Tip number 1 - do not look at your email first thing in the morning. Inevitably, you see something that sucks you in or frustrates you. That leads to 30 minutes or more of responding, researching, or contemplating the necessary response. Immediately afterward you already feel behind for the day. Avoid that.Instead, define times when you will start email each day, review later in the morning, an afternoon time frame, and finally, an evening close out session (which should be at least an hour before you go to bed). I recommend closing your email until your next scheduled time to review email. I have found by doing this, I am actually more productive in the emails I review and respond to because I have a specific plan for being in my inbox.
Set time limits
To build on the first recommendation, establish time limits for those periods you are working with email. Perhaps you define a routine that says your first review of email will be 1 hour after you wake up and you will spend 30 minutes reviewing, reading, and responding to what has come in since you last checked the night before. You may need a 45 to 60-minute window later in the morning, just before lunch, and again in the afternoon. Define the periods of time that will work best for you in conjunction with your routine of set times each day. By having these specific windows of time, you can prioritize your emails and ensure you address the most time-sensitive ones first and then work your way down.
Create organization mailboxes
Having a method of managing your email is a critical step as well. Just working from top to bottom is not always the best strategy. Depending on how many emails you receive throughout the day, or even within your windows of time can help you determine how to best organize your email.Some things to consider - sort email by subject line. This can ensure that you see all of the information about a single subject together. Many email applications allow you to maintain emails by ‘thread,’ which will group all of the related emails into a single view. This can be helpful if you typically have a lot of people contributing to important subjects. You can also choose to sort by sender, which may help prioritize who you review and respond to first.Another tip I recommend is setting up folders/mailboxes/label for sorting that allows you to review and email, and move/sort for the next action. By having this process, I keep my inbox very clean and prioritized during the first review. I can quickly decide whether an email requires more time and is more urgent - I place these in the ‘Today’ folder. Others that require more attention, but are not immediately urgent, I place in the ‘Tomorrow’ folder. If the email is just for my review and may not require a response at all, I place in the ‘Review’ folder. Finally, if it is something that I want to come back to later and ask more questions or someone is going to send me additional information in the future, I place that in the ‘Follow Up’ folder.I also try to maintain David Allen’s 2-minute rule from Getting Things Done and if I can respond and resolve the email within 2 minutes, I do and then remove it from my inbox.
Connect with your task manager
If you maintain a task manager - either digital or analog - taking the actions from the emails and placing them into your system is an excellent way to keep the task top of mind, but still away from your inbox. Many task management applications let you send the email right to your task inbox, as well as assign dates and time right from your email inbox. This is a great way to process and prioritize the work that is coming from email. Then you can move the original email to the appropriate folder I mentioned above.
Clear your inbox daily
I know this may sound impossible or even undesirable. I have seen countless numbers of peers inboxes that have thousands of emails in their inbox. Many of them still marked unread. When I ask why they do this, most say they don’t want to lose track of anything. Yet, every time they look for something they are scrolling through hundreds or thousands of emails for the one. By utilizing the organization and prioritization folders, you can clear your inbox without losing track of anything. Almost all email applications today also have outstanding search capabilities. If you are using Gmail or Outlook, both have very powerful search tools that can be used to find what you are looking for very quickly. So move those completed emails to an archive folder as soon as you have taken the needed action on it.I used to maintain several folders for my Outlook email, and when a task was completed I would move the email into the different buckets to keep them organized. What I found was that I spent a lot of time doing that and have changed to maintain a single archive folder that I can search within when I need to find anything. I also use ‘smart search folders’ that allow me to set specific parameters for common searches and keep those together in one place. An example may be any emails from your boss - you can set a specific search by person and then just let the application keep that sorted for you. You still place the original email in the single archive folder, but the email now shows up in your ‘smart folder.’All of these will lead to the reality of inbox zero at the end of the day. That will help your productivity and sanity.
Send fewer emails
This one sounds silly, but the first law of email must be:
If you want to receive fewer emails, send fewer emails.
Think about how email typically works, if you send an email to 6 people, most of them feel obligated to respond in some fashion, even it is with just a ‘thanks’ typed into it. All of those have to be processed at some point. Email is efficient in many ways, but sometimes a quick phone call or even a text message may be a better way to communicate than via email. That helps eliminate at least one email and maybe several more depending on the subject. Plus, sometimes its just good to have good ol’ fashioned one on one dialogue.
Use third-party tools
In addition to the tips above, which can all be done within almost any existing email application, other tools are available to help you manage your email inbox. Many of these tools are just add-ons to your existing software that will automatically manage incoming emails and sort them for you. You can set powerful rules up to start moving items from your inbox to other folders that you can manage throughout your day. Depending on your email software the number of these applications may vary, but a quick Google search for email tools will likely provide several options for you to select from.Email doesn’t have to be a burden. You do not need to let your inbox rule your schedule, your evenings, and your weekends. Start by using one or two of these ideas to help you build a system that allows you to stay in control of your email. With practice, you will find that not only do you feel better about how you are using your time with email, but others around you will notice as well and align with how and when you respond to anything they send to you.How will you begin to tame your email inbox? Share your ideas and thoughts in the comments section. If you are looking for any additional tips, here is a great article from Asian Efficiency - 10 Must-Have Email Filters That Will Free Up Hours A Day