Our email inboxes encompass our lives, our work, and unfortunately junk and spam as well. With all that goes in and out of our email, it can sometimes become overwhelming to sift through it all and still deliver timely responses to every person that needs one.
Email by its nature should help us save time. Asking questions or collaborating with clients, colleagues, and friends via email allows you the freedom to multitask and doesn’t drain the time it takes to locate contacts in person or play phone tag with them. In addition to saving that time, email allows communications to be documented and saved for later reference.
Despite how wonderful email can be, it can also quickly become disorganized. Important emails can suddenly be lost, and before you know if spammers can take over. With just a few tips you can communicate more efficiently, help keep your inbox organized, and make your email correspondence stand out.
Respond to emails promptly, it will help clear your inbox and keep you organized. Leaving new emails in your inbox for a day or two drains time in the long run, especially if it comes down to crunch time and you need to respond to multiple emails at once. The best solution here is to try to respond to emails immediately after reading them. It’s also important to know when the most appropriate expected response time is for your professional email, as there is certain etiquette per industry that require differing response times.
Longer emails that require detailed responses may be addressed in separate emails. However it is important to at least address some portion promptly. Each subsequent email should also highlight or address the specific portion your response is referencing.
Schedule when you check your email. Having a regimented schedule will help keep that inbox organized. It will also help others gauge what kind of response time they should expect when emailing you. Whether its checking it constantly or every couple days, having a system in place will prevent your email from taking over!
Utilize third party tools. On the web you’ll find a wealth of applications and third-party plug-ins that can seriously save you time and help you email friends and colleagues more efficiently. One of places to find some of these tools and applications is the Microsoft Marketplace. The Microsoft Office Marketplace features numerous custom toolbar downloads that integrate time-saving tools seamlessly into MS Outlook.
Use labels & folders whenever possible! Different email systems use difference methods of labeling or categorizing. Gmail for example, allow you to applied labels of you choosing to difference emails, and allows you to label difference email addresses as well. Utilizing features such as these to keep work and personal emails separate will help to minimize confuse and clutter, and also enable you to quickly reference emails you need to find.
Organizing not only by category but also by urgency is also a great way to keep on top of important emails. One of the biggest email problems arises when the crucial emails slip through the cracks, as the less relevant or personal emails clutter your inbox. Separating emails by urgency helps to regulate which emails require a response and the timeline in which they should be responded to.
It doesn’t hurt to be selective in your response bin either. Going from trying to respond to everything to responding to hardly anything are two extremes you should avoid. This is why it’s important to make sure you use labels or filters as not everything necessarily deserves responses and you shouldn’t feel you need to. But for those important messages that do deserve your attention, make sure they are organized in such a way that you can give it the attention it deserves.
Save time by being succinct. Email at work does not need to include jokes, banter, or even elaborate essays. Work email should consist of asking for information, or supplying information, that’s it! By refraining from excess verbiage your emails remain more informative and authoritative, and it also will save you and your recipients serious time. Simply getting to the point in your emails will also prevent numerous back and forth messages.
Read it before you move it. Don’t label or move an email from your inbox unless you have actually read it. If you begin moving unread emails into folders it is more than likely they’ll stay that way. Keep all unread emails where they belong – in your inbox!
Utilize the subject line of every email. An effective subject line can help summarize the content of your email, enabling the recipient to immediately decipher the email as work related, personal, or spam! Making the email specific not only helps the recipient, but also helps you find it when you need to reference it weeks or months later.
Take advantage of free email accounts. Email accounts are not difficult to obtain. The most popular and most robust email accounts are free, and take only seconds to create! The ease if getting a free email account comes in handy for all of those newsletters and updates you may want to subscribe to. Rather than bog down your work account, or even your everyday personal email account, get a separate account to house all of those newsletters and bulletins that you can’t seem to resist, and it will give you less emails to sift through when you need to find something!
Label spam. When you receive spam, it’s not enough to simply delete it. Make sure you label it as spam or black list it when it sneaks into your inbox. By blocking spam you can prevent future emails from that sender from creeping into your inbox, thus reducing the amount of spam you get over time. It’s the best method for fighting off those annoying spammers. In addition, most email clients have spam filters build right in. If you want to have spam automatically filtered out of your inbox, make sure the spam filters are turned on. It isn’t a guarantee of blocking all spam, but it’s a good method of keeping most out of your way.
Leave your mark. Signature lines are a great way to let email recipients know who you are and we’re your from. Whether you’re new to the company or are corresponding with a potential new client, letting people know where you’re from, linking to your website(s), are even adding a provocative quote adds valuable information and makes your email more memorable.
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