6 simple steps to mastering your inbox like a pro
Emails. They just keep coming! Working out of your inbox can feel like you’re treading water. The more you respond to, more come! It’s a never-ending cycle.! This cycle can suck hours out of your day, draining productivity.
With more of our work shifting to online and the rise of electronic communication, there has never been a better time to break the email habits that are draining your time, with Brand Sugar’s 6 Simple Tips for Mastering your Inbox Like a Pro, and save yourself hours of procrastination.
1. Designate time to check your emails
You’ve probably heard this one before, it’s what all the successful people do and there’s a reason for it. Constantly checking and looking out for emails if you’re not actually going to process them is a time wasting habit.
Booking out your own time is a really valuable way of working and respecting your own time. Block out an hour in the morning to triage your emails and a second window towards the end of your day to respond to those emails which require a little more thought.
This tip ties in closely with our Time Blocking technique from our last blog. If you haven’t had the chance to read it yet, check out our recent blog: Top 10 Time Management Tips – How to Manage your Time like a Boss.
2. Let go of the clutter and unsubscribe
If you’re anything like us, you have probably signed up to a myriad of newsletters over the years – with good intentions! But now, their sales-y emails are clogging your inbox on the daily, and they are just adding to that unread email count. Truth bomb: that time you spend deciphering whether its junk or not, is not productive! It may feel like you whip through quickly and delete what doesn’t catch your eye, but the reality is, it all adds up And eats into time which you could be spending on your business.
If you’re not ready to say goodbye to it all, free sites like unroll.me will generate a list of everything you are subscribed to and allow you to easily pick and choose what you want to continue receiving. Try to be ruthless in this process, pick three you actually intend on reading and say goodbye to the rest!
3. Set up folders for success
If you don’t have a simple filing system in place, it’s not too late to save your inbox. Set up easy folders you’re actually going to use. Think of general headings which describe what you’re working on. A good example to follow is naming them by the certain projects you’re working on. Then one or two catch all folders for those emails which don’t quite fit into a specific project, such as ‘Admin’, ‘Banking’ and ‘Personal’.
Take this one step further and you can get fancy by setting rules that send emails from specific recipients to a certain folder to keep things organised. For example, you could send all emails from Commonwealth Bank straight to your ‘Banking’ folder for checking at a time convenient to you.
Once you’ve set them up, we guarantee you’re on the road to a much more organised inbox.
4. Set up a triage system for tackling your emails
With the above steps in place you are ready to smash through those emails awaiting. But how do you know which email to reply to first? Well, there’s four categories that you can classify your emails as when they get to you:
● The ‘1-minute repliers’
If it takes a minute to reply to it, just reply to it now and archive it. And it’s gone!
● More complex replies
These ones take a bit more time and brain power to reply to. That’s okay, just keep it in your inbox and flag it for follow up later during your designated emails time block.
● File it, or delete it!
Not all emails warrant a response. For example, you might be cc’d on emails for a particular project as a FYI and there’s no reason for you to keep chains of other people’s conversations. Be gone!
● Urgent!!!
Again, we are taking you back to our recent blog: Top 10 Time Management Tips – How to Manage Your Time Like a Boss. Here we taught you the valuable skill or prioritization. Use your triage time to assess the priority of each tasks and mark those which will result in the largest negative impact for urgent follow up through the day. These are the ones which will form part of the day’s work and should be recorded on your to do list for urgent action.
5. Set deadlines
This will be different for everybody but it’s important you set a general rule of thumb for how long you will allow yourself to respond to emails. If someone is emailing you, they are typically not expecting an instant response, unless of course they have marked it as urgent.
Here’s a guide on what you could set for your response times:
Emails from within your specific team: 1 day.
Email from within your organisation: 2 days.
Emails from externals: 2-5 days.
It’s simple, but it’s effective. Establishing these timeframes for yourself will allow you to better prioritize your inbox and plan your day’s workload. It’s a bit like setting a Service Level Agreement (SLA) but with yourself.
6. Pick up the phone
It sounds like an obvious one, doesn’t it? But sometimes we need to be reminded that email isn’t designed for instant messaging. If you find yourself going back and forth with someone in an email chain that keeps going; pick up the phone.
Never underestimate the power of a quick and simple verbal conversation to clarify a few details pertaining to a project or task. A 5-minute conversation on the phone could save you an hour of email exchanges – and confusion! In the interest of efficiency, let this serve as a reminder that a good old fashioned phone call can be absolutely magical when email just isn’t cutting it.
