Control Your Email Instead of Letting Email Control You
The average professional receives over 175 emails each day, and many of my clients receive over 400 new emails daily, causing them to view handling their inboxes as very time-consuming. This is truly an overwhelming amount of communications. It can make you wonder how any real work gets done beyond simply reading each day's new emails.
If someone were to peer over your shoulder right now to look at your email inbox, what would that person find? Do you keep just about everything received in your inbox, making it such that you have several hundreds or thousands of emails in there? Do you keep action items alongside retention items in your inbox, making it harder to know what's been handled or what needs to be done? Is there too much to dig through for what you need? One tip with an immense impact on productivity is the realization that your email inbox is not your to-do list. I recommend using your email inbox as exactly that... an "in box". New items funnel through as needed.
To make this funneling easier, shift your mentality from "checking" to "processing" new messages.
According to stats from email marketing company BlueHornet, folks look at their phones more than 150 times a day on average, many of which are to glance at their email inboxes. Each time you read a new email and, then, plan to come back to deal with it later, that initial reading becomes a distraction because, upon returning to your inbox, you have to re-read each message and re-start your thought-process on how to respond. Stop letting emails rob you of valuable time! Retain fewer emails and move those being kept out of your inbox.
Instead of wasting time by reading and re-reading your emails throughout each day, develop a habit of OHIO and "only handle it once", meaning you read new messages only when you are ready to deal with them and you use your inbox as a funnel instead of a holding zone.
Here are some tips to boost productivity in your email management efforts:
If the email is asking you to complete a task that takes less than 5 minutes to complete, follow Nike's advice and "Just do it" immediately upon reading it.
If the email is asking you to complete a task that takes longer, move it to your running data dump of to-do items needing your attention, and schedule time for its completion.
Move appointment requests to your calendar.
File reference emails in your personal folders, making sure you have enough folders that everything has a home and no more than necessary so you never have to wonder in which folder you should file a new message, ensuring it’s easier to find them later.
Put delete to work so you have fewer retained emails to search through when looking for a specific one.
Replace multiple, back-and-forth email messages with a quick phone call, even if you have to follow that call with a summary email for documentation purposes.
Unsubscribe from emails you no longer read rather than investing more time in repeatedly deleting the unread ones.
Do you find email overwhelming? How do you address email overload now? Which of these tactics will you employ in turning the email you receive into a productive communication tool?
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