It’s 9 am Monday. You need to get started on a huge hiring project, but you also have 46 new emails to sort through.
You know new hires anxiously awaiting replies sent a few of those messages. With your inbox the way it is now, prioritizing responses to those new hires means manually going through every email to figure out which demand your immediate attention.
Feeling stressed? You’re not alone.
Nordic IT, which develops email solutions for maritime clients, explains “approximately 92 percent of employees experience elevated blood pressure when handling emails at work.” The good news is that effective methods for taming your inbox exist. Here are six easy-to-implement tricks that will save you hours each week.
Set Specific Times to Check Your Inbox
How many times each day do you check your email? For most employees, the answer is “too many.”
Don’t let your inbox pull your focus every time a new email comes in. Focusing on one project at a time instead of constantly switching from task to task is a much more productive way to work.
Buy yourself focus by setting specific times to check your email and sticking to that schedule. Block off your email time on your public calendar so you will not be interrupted by meetings or other distractions.
Adjust Your Email Notifications
While setting aside specific times to work through your inbox is helpful, taking this a step further and turning off notifications removes temptations to go off schedule. When your phone and computer show popups and sound chimes alerting you to the arrival of each new email throughout the day, your attention snaps away from the task at hand. As a result, your productivity drops.
If you have a particular email subject or sender that should come ahead of all other projects, use an email service that allows you to customize push notifications.
Create a Triage System
We’ve all had to interrupt a busy workweek to carve out a few hours to get through hundreds of unread emails. What if you could significantly reduce that time by developing a simple workflow?
You can. The process depends on categorizing each email as requiring a response now, later or never. It works like this:
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When an email needs a response now, leave it in your inbox and open the next message. Once you’ve made it through all your new emails, answer the ones remaining in your inbox.
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When an email needs a response later, snooze it and set it to reappear in your inbox at the appropriate time.
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When an email will never need a response, archive or delete it and focus on the messages that matter.
Applying the categories each time you check your inbox can save you hours every week and help you avoid decision fatigue. You quickly remove clutter from your inbox and end up with only the emails that require immediate action.
Unsubscribe
Instead of just deleting marketing emails you never read, make the extra three clicks and unsubscribe. Over time, unsubscribing will reduce the number of emails you receive by thousands.
Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
Using keyboard shortcuts allows you to breeze through your inbox. Create a cheat sheet of the shortcuts you expect to use frequently and keep that document where you can see it easily.
It may seem at first like using keyboard shortcuts saves minimal time. You will soon discover that processing all your emails without lifting your hands to work a mouse or touch the screen increases efficiency, feels more natural and is ergonomic.
Try Out Apps Designed to Make You More Productive
All email clients are not created equal. Thankfully, there are a lot of really great tools you can take advantage of to make your experience processing work emails even better by turning your inbox into the to-do list it is actually intended to be.
For instance, you can find tools that integrate with your existing email clients to let you pin an especially important email to the top of your inbox. That way, you will always see the pinned message first regardless of when it arrived.
Want to handle some emails later? We described snoozing messages above. Is everything all taken care of in another email? Mark it as done to remove it from your inbox.
You can also save time on proofreading your outgoing messages by relying on an editing app. Look for one that checks spelling, flags potential grammar errors and provides suggestions for making sentences clearer to recipients. Well-written emails minimize miscommunication.
Email might be taking up a majority of your day now, but that doesn’t have to be true forever. Deploy the tips and tools mentioned above, then watch your inbox start working for you—instead of the other way around.
06 July 2022
Category
HR News Article