Are you tired of sacrificing productivity and the endless frivolous subject lines of emails? It doesn’t take long to get into overload with emails coming in, so here are some tips for keeping your emails in check:
Gmail offers a priority inbox with options for important and unimportant emails based on the sender and subject line. The benefit is seeing the most important emails that need your attention first in your inbox.
Boomerang is a free plug-in for Firefox and Chrome with Gmail that allows you to schedule an email to send for the future, bring an email back to your inbox at a certain time (like trip reminders, transaction deadlines or client arrivals). Boomerang will also return an email to your inbox if you have not received a reply after a certain number of days. We often leave an email in our inbox just to remind us to follow up or have easy access for later, Boomerang will clear it out for now and have it come back when you need it.
Go through your inbox, and delete everything that isn’t relevant: old business, promotional emails, old office memos, anything that’s more than a week old and unread. Once you get rid of the unnecessary, you’ll see nothing but the most important messages.
Do you have a lot of promotional or junk mail? Most email providers have an “unsubscribe” option near the sender’s address, or it’s in the email, usually at the very bottom with the company info. Unless it’s from a company you regularly use or purchase things from, unsubscribe from the emails. You’ll notice a big difference in how many emails you receive.
When responding to new leads or possible clients, have a template ready to go, which saves time in not having to type the same thing over and over.
Clean up your “Sent” folder. This will free up space in your content storage. Find emails that included large attachments and delete them first. Better yet, perform a bulk delete of any sent emails that are more than a month old. If there’s something that you cannot part with, add it to your “Archived” folder.
As new emails come in, FastCompany recommends that you organize the remaining emails in folders. Instead of subject, name your folders in order of response deadlines.
Unless you’re waiting for an important message, check emails three times per day. Have a set amount of time during each check to either respond, file or delete new emails. Once you’ve streamlined your inbox, this will be much easier to maintain.
Your productivity depends on how much time you spend on “busy” work, and organization is key–even virtual organization! Our customer relations management team can organize your email inbox. Call us today at
(757) 282-6496 or contact us online to start adding hours to your day.
