Email Management: 5 Effective Tips You Should Know

E-mail is one of the most widely used means of communication in the world at the moment. However, few people enjoy going through their mail because managing their email has become a nightmare.

Recent reviews on Amon-Avis show that answering emails is one of the tasks that demand the most time, and if it is approached badly it leads to unproductiveness. In this article, we will list 5 tips to help you manage your email effectively.

 

1. Decide What Time of Day is Best to go Through Your Inbox

For the vast majority, the first hours of the morning are the most productive. That is why it is advisable to dedicate them to perform those tasks that require the greatest effort, which our performance at work is evaluated. But whatever your most productive hours are, don’t get distracted by every email you receive. Ideally, you should spend a moment a day going through your inbox and set a maximum time of 20 minutes to do so.

2. Create an Automatic Filter and Avoid Spam

Even if you never open spam emails, avoid being distracted by them, and don’t waste a minute deleting them. Create an automatic filter that sends spam directly to the trash. All email servers allow you to create filters –Mailbird, Gmail, and Outlook- and although it may seem quite laborious to do so, not doing it will waste much more time.

If you are also subscribed to newsletters that are not related to your work, you can also create an automatic filter and classify them in a folder specifically created for them, so they do not invade your inbox and do not distract you from what is important.

3. Use Folders to Classify Emails 

All those emails that cannot be replied to in 2 minutes, or require action on your part – e.g. perform a task, look for information, consult your boss before replying or forwarding the email to a colleague – can be classified into folders. Thus, when the time comes to spend more time on each of those emails, you will know where to find them and it will take less time to resolve them.

4. Create Templates

There are many situations in which the same email is repeated frequently, for example establishing contact with potential clients or future employees whom you do not know personally, or responding to emails in which the answer is always the same. Whatever the case, it is very useful to create templates. You can use it as many times as you need, spending just a few minutes to customize the header of the email.

 

5. Decrease the Number of Newsletter

It is very common to go online and subscribe to the news on different websites we like. If this becomes a habit, the number of newsletters received can be overwhelming. For that reason, a newsletter subscription cleanup might be needed. There are tons of automated tools such as Unrollme or Unsubscriber to help you speed up this task or you can manually do it.

If you look in your inbox right now, what story does it tell you? What kind of emails do you see? Personal, work, spam, newsletters, relevant, irrelevant…? Or a mix of everything? And if you look at the time-lapse between the oldest email in your inbox and today’s date, are we talking about days, weeks, months, or years? If you don’t like the story you see now, we have good news for you: It is your story. You are not only one of the main characters, but also the author. You can rewrite the story and change the script. Thus, you can become a proactive business builder, rather than a reactive email firefighter.