Is an empty inbox a sign of a productive work life? How can you achieve 'inbox zero'? When we receive so emails, it's tough to stay organized and on top of everything. Let's look at strategies to manage your inbox and boost productivity.
Analyze Your Inbox
Analyzing your inbox can help provide insights into how clients and customers interact with you and your company. You will gain a better understanding of how different they are and how you should reply to their styles. For example, some may not like to email you, but really ought to be contacting you. Others might email you at all times of day about various spurious matters.
Combine email and regular calls
Although email is great, they can't solve all your problems. So perhaps you can add regular phone/video calls to help reassure colleagues and customers that you can maintain contact, handle questions and manage ad hoc matters on a regular basis - rather than through sporadic emails. They will soon learn that they can discuss matters more efficiently through regular calls and not rely exclusively on emails. This in turn can help create better understanding, save time and manage your communications more effectively.
Tips to Boost Email Productivity
Managing your email can be an arduous, especially when you have hundreds of unread messages in your inbox. So, it's a good idea to take some time and sort out your emails. Sort the important ones from the less important by creating different folders. Store the more important emails in one folder, and the less important in another.
Here are some practical tips you can use straightaway:
Decide action needed to be taken on each email. Whether it needs to be responded to, delegated, or deleted.
OHIO (Only Handle It Once): Act quickly and don't procrastinate - don't hang on to emails. This One Touch approach can be marvelously effective.
Create templates and FAQs that you can use to respond to similar emails faster.
Set up email filters: your emails will then be automatically prioritized and categorized.
Allocate specific blocks of time to write/respond to emails. Then, you will be more focused on effective time management.
Apply the 80/20 rule to ensure you prioritise your time on the highest priority tasks.
Manage social media, so that your aren't always checking your phone for trivial updates on conversations or cute cat videos.
Schedule your emails: be kind to your colleagues. Set the sending time to office hours.
Learn email shortcuts for Gmail and Outlook to boost your productivity
Invest in training for writing more effective emails. Clearer and more concise emails all round will prevent poor communications (eg misunderstanding, delays, poor decisions!)
Email automation and management tips
Consider unsubscribing from any emails that don't add value to your life. Remove yourself from any websites, groups and committees that are no longer necessary. After that, take a look at how you can prioritize emails by flagging or starring relevant messages or creating folders to organize different types of emails. Set up automated messages to give information like: out of office, opening hours and other contact points.
Automation rules can also be set up to ensure that routine emails are triggered in the right order and at the appropriate times. Then, the proper procedures can be implemented to ensure tasks are processed correctly and promptly. For example, these rules can be applied to confirming sales orders, answering sales queries and arranging deliveries.
To Conclude
Having a cluttered inbox can be detrimental to your productivity. But by taking the time to get it under control, you will save yourself time and energy in the long run. Try one today. When you start implementing some of these strategies, from organization to automation, you’ll be better able to stay organized, prioritize important tasks and eventually reach inbox zero.
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