Email productivity is all about developing good habits to help you control your inbox. These habits take time to develop, but once they are in place they can transform your life.
Managing your inbox can be a challenge. It can seem impossible to achieve inbox zero and it can be difficult. Follow these tips and use useful strategies such as parse emails to make your inbox work to your advantage instead of against it.
Organize Your Inbox
Email can be an effective tool for business but it can be overwhelming. Keeping your inbox organized can improve your productivity. By organizing your emails, you can quickly find the information you need and get back to work. This can be done by using folders or a unified inbox like Mailbird. By taking small steps, you can improve your inbox and create a healthier relationship with it.
You can organize your emails by creating folders according to the topic or project. You could, for example, have folders labeled “Titan project,” “School board” and “Sales meeting.” Each time you receive an email that is related to one of those topics, decide whether it needs to be addressed immediately or can wait until later. Then, move the email to the appropriate folder. This will keep your inbox uncluttered and prevent you from forgetting to respond or take action on important emails.
Alternatively, you can use an automated email triage system to categorize your emails for you. This will automatically sort incoming emails according to their importance. For example, “Inbox,” To Do,” Follow Up,” and “Someday.” You can save a lot of valuable time by not having to triage every message.
It is important to organize your email regularly, regardless of how you decide to do it. It is best to schedule a time block each week for reviewing and moving all outstanding messages to their proper categories. For example, you might set a timer for 25 minutes when you check your inbox, and once the timer is up, you can move any unread messages to their proper folders.
Unread Messages Can Be Deleted
The dreadful sight of hundreds (or thousands) of unread emails can be more than just a distraction; it’s a potential productivity killer. Unless you have a specific reason to keep them, delete your spam and newsletter emails to make room for the actual emails you need to respond to.
If you think you might need to keep an email in the future, archive it instead of deleting it. If you’re an agency AE for example, you should organize your templates in separate folders to make it easier to find and select the right template when you respond to emails.
You can also delete unread emails by going through your Spam folder, but you should always read the subject lines first. Deleting an email that you don’t want can lead to problems. It could also waste space on your account which you might have better used for important emails with clients or sales.
While some may argue that using additional tools only adds to your stress, the truth is a well-organized email inbox and the use email productivity hacks such as Streak will reduce your email clutter. Follow these tips to take control of your inbox and put it on automatic pilot for long-term sustainable productivity.
Set Specific Blocks Of Email Time
Email can be a distraction that interferes with more important tasks. The best tips for email productivity are to only respond to and check emails at certain times during the day and to remove all unnecessary email notifications. If you’re tempted to open up your inbox during these times, try an app or site blocker such as Freedom or AppBlock.
Instead of treating your inbox like a catch-all, create different folders for each category of message. For example, have a folder for items that need to be dealt with this week, one for items you will handle in the next month or quarter, and a general “FYI” folder for any other general communications that don’t require immediate attention. This will help you get more done during the day by reducing the time spent in your inbox.
Consider using filters to automatically direct incoming emails into the correct folders, based on keywords and other criteria such as senders, subject line, size, etc. Email management tools like Mailbutler can automate email processing and schedule emails for a later time. Emerging artificial intelligence technologies can also help improve email productivity by providing suggestions for the best response to a message, and writing and editing your responses with spelling and grammar corrections.
Another simple tip to improve your email productivity is to use pre-written templates that you can reuse for common responses. You can save time by creating a template for a topic that you receive countless questions about.
Set Follow-Ups For Auto-Pilot
Email automation is a powerful tool for email productivity. You can automate follow-ups and focus on other tasks, while your emails send themselves behind the scenes. Yesware Campaigns allows you to set up automatic follow-up emails that will send until the recipient replies or opens them.
This will save time and prevent important emails from being missed. For example, you can set up an email follow-up series for new prospects that will automatically ping the prospect every few days until they respond. This way you will never forget to follow up with a prospect and potentially lose a sales opportunity.
You can use an email scheduler for automated follow-ups at a specific time and date. Whether it is a reminder email to follow-up with a prospect or a weekly reminder to complete a task, you can set up an automatic recurring reminder for yourself and get back to work.
If you have long email threads with customers or a lot of back and forth, an automated follow-up series will ensure that all conversations are captured in NetSuite. CloudExtend Autopilot is available for both threaded and email address based syncing to NetSuite. Once you enable Autopilot an email will always be synced to your NetSuite account unless you manually stop it. You can check an email’s status in Autopilot by clicking the three dots next the email, or by looking at the Outlook category which shows the NetSuite record that the email is syncing with.
