Want 90 Hours Back This Year? Manage Your Email in a New Way
Email is a part of life these days. When I speak with people and ask about the biggest frustrations they have in their everyday life, email is always on that list. “I have too many emails,” they say. It is not uncommon to see people with hundreds of emails in their inbox, many of them unread. They feel as though they can never catch up. Many feel bad that they miss replying to important emails or just ones that they wanted to. Several minutes are wasted each time they are in their email looking for the one they wanted to reply to. Does this sound familiar?Last year more than 205 billion emails were sent each day, yes billion with a B. It appears to be a catch-22 situation: we all hate the amount of email we receive, yet it is more than 80% of the population’s preferred method of communication. New communication tools such as messaging, Slack, or GroupMe only add to the number of inputs we receive on a daily basis. What can you do to better manage that overwhelming inbox?
Only 38% of emails received contain important, action-required information.On average, 2.1 hours of every day productivity is lost to interruptions. Email is the top offender.It can take up to 15-20 minutes to recover from those interruptions and be productive again.
It does not have to be this way. Regardless of your environment an office, in a retail store, or traveling from site to site there are ways you can better manage your email. It will take some effort and discipline on your part though.
Stop Using Your Inbox as a Holding Box
Your inbox should only be for seeing new emails received. One of the biggest time wasters for email is touching and reading the same email over and over. Once you see a new email in your inbox, read it and then make a determination on what the next step will be.
Establish an Email Process for Yourself
Not every email needs a response right away or in many cases, at all. Unfortunately, we live in a world of instant gratification, but it doesn’t have to be that way for everything, especially not email. Establish a few times each day that you will review your email. It could be morning, noon, and after dinner or if your environment requires more attention, establish a once an hour pattern. You could choose 50 past the hour and set a ten-minute window for inbox management.In addition to establishing your time windows, I would recommend adopting the AD3 method - Act Delay Delegate Delete.Act on items that can be completed in 2 minutes or less. Your options here are DO NOW or MOVE. (Keep in mind that 2 minutes goes by quickly, only very short responses should fall into this category)Delay items that will need more than 2 minutes to properly reply or act on would be delayed for later action. (See below)Delegate Should or could someone else be handling this email? This is a good time to review whether you were the direct recipient of the email or if you were cc’d. If it wasn’t directly to you, it is already being delegated for you.Delete items that do not need any action and do not contain any information that will be useful later. These could be quick update emails, cc’d emails that do not affect you, or general junk/spam type emails.
Use the Tools Within Your Mailbox Software
In most cases, you do not need any additional software to help in managing your email. Almost all mailboxes allow you to create folders or tags (Gmail users). Set up a couple of specific folders to help you sort your incoming messages. Set one up as Today, another as Tomorrow, one more for This Week, add a folder or tag for Review, and finally on for Follow Up. These will be where your messages go after you review them one time in your inbox.When you review new messages, skim the contents and make a decision on the action required based on the information within. Then based on that, move the message to one of the folders you set up based on urgency. Use the Review folder for items that contain important information, but are not time sensitive and do not require immediate attention. It will simply take more than a minute or two to digest the information being communicated. For items that do not necessitate action, especially emails where you are cc’d, archive or delete those immediately.If you use a task management or reminder system, you may choose to add the Today, Tomorrow, or This Week emails to your ‘to-do’ list. By keeping these emails in the new folders you set up, it helps to prioritize and isolate the most important items.For emails or information that require you to follow up later or which you are waiting for a response to your request can be moved to the Follow Up folder. This makes it easy to scan on a regular basis to see what you may still be waiting for so you can move forward. Again, this helps to eliminate the ‘hunting’ through your inbox for that ‘one thing you need to check on.”
Use Other Software to Help
There are multiple options now available for any platform you use email on. There are apps for phones and tablets that build some of this sorting in for you. You can simply swipe to delay an email for a set period of time. This is a handy way to keep your inbox clean, but feel comfortable the message will come back to you when you know you will have time to manage it appropriately. Many of the apps will also make it very easy to move a message to other task management or to do list applications. External email services like SaneBox will take these steps even further by giving you options for longer delays, easily allowing you to unsubscribe to unwanted emails, or automatically moving emails to folders based on the sender. These can be very handy to help in prioritizing emails without having to wade through things arriving in your inbox.There are plenty of options for better managing your email inbox. You do not need to succumb to the idea that spending hours on email each day is a necessity. Using these methods, I rarely have more than a dozen or so emails in my inbox at any time. I end each day with a clean inbox so I can have a fresh start the next day and begin working on what I prioritized from the day before.Imagine what you could do with the found time from a different method of managing your inbox. If you saved only 15 minutes per day from having a process for email you would find over an hour and a half of extra time each week, 7.5 hours each month, and a whopping 91 hours each year. That time could be used for your own self-development, for hobbies you never seem to have time for, or just more quality time with friends or family. Your inbox is within your control, and you can make a difference for yourself.What will you do with your new found time? What other ideas do you have for managing your email? Click here or on the comments button above to share your thoughts.