Email is one of the essential communication tools for business you will find out there. It isn’t as intrusive as a phone call, isn’t as informal as text, and still manages to be both fast and convenient. It allows you to engage, as an entrepreneur or employee, in normal business from wherever you are.
Email allows you to communicate with both customers and colleagues. It allows you to set up meetings and do deliberations on projects. It’s a powerful medium that carries the modern business forward.
The problem is that email can actually affect our productivity when used the wrong way. Many people will spend more than 25% of their day reading and responding to emails. In fact, according to <ahref="https://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_social_economy" rel="nofollow noopener">McKinsey, email is second in time consumption only to the role-specific tasks people do at their jobs.
source: McKinsey
The problem becomes greater the higher up the ladder you go. When you’re a CEO or a member of senior management, then it’s not unlikely for you to receive hundreds or thousands of emails every day. Just going through them, let alone responding to them, is going to take all of your will power and energy, leaving you none for the rest of your work.
Our email inbox being full of old emails that we haven’t opened, let alone read and responded to, can leave us feeling frustrated and distracted. So, how do you deal with the problem? How can you better manage your emails? Well, here are best tips to help you out.
Have a Specific Time for Dealing with Emails
Your email program should be restricted to a specific block of time, rather than the entire day. If you’re open to checking your email at whatever time of day then you’re probably going to get distracted by numerous notifications coming in at different times of the day. That can badly affect your productivity.
The best solution is to do away with this completely and get a service with professional essay writers to handle the emails for you. You’ll get a professional to handle your emails and you’ll also have more free time to handle other things. However, if you can’t do that, you’ll just have to set aside time for the work.
Just like it’s a good idea to avoid getting distracted by emails when you’re working, it’s also a good idea to avoid getting distracted while checking your email. Switch your phone off and let everyone know that you’re busy so you can give the task all of your attention.
The amount of time you need to go through your emails will mostly depend on how many emails you receive and how frequently you check them. Some people will need less than 10 minutes to go through their emails every day while others will need a couple of hours. Some will split the task and do it twice or thrice a day. You can choose whatever works for you; just make sure that you are fully invested in the task at hand when you begin to concentrate on it.
Take Action
If you want to keep your email under control, then you’ll need to make some quick decisions, taking immediate action to respond to emails and handle issues. The more you delay for later, the less time you’ll have to do other things.
Start by checking for emails that you don’t need to open. These are promotional emails and others, which you can consider spam and delete. There are also other messages that don’t seem to need a reply. These you can either delete or archive. By now you’ll have pruned your inbox down to only the important emails, and it will be easier to find out which emails are the most important.
You certainly don’t want emails sitting unopened for days, unless you’re going to be away from your email for a long time, such as when you’re on vacation. Take no more than 48 hours to check your emails and respond to the ones that need a response. In fact, make sure to respond as soon as you actually read the message.
If you can’t be immediate with your response, then let the sender know you have received their email and that you will get back to them soon. Have a deadline for doing this and stick to that deadline.
Alternatively, consider outsourcing the response to someone, especially to help it sound professional enough. You can get a custom writing service to do this for you.
Organize your Inbox
Things like categories, folders, and labels are your friends. To be sure, most of the emails you receive can be deleted. However, you’ll want to keep the ones that are important to your business, such as various correspondences. Fortunately, most email clients come with features that allow you to label different emails and sort them into categories.
Organize your inbox by prioritizing emails and sorting them into different folders and categories. Broad categories can be opened for wide ranges of subjects, such as a category for finances, clients, and so on.
You can then create further subcategories within the categories to relate them to more specific things. Specific clients within the “Clients” category can have their own folders. Specific projects can have their own folders within the “Projects” categories, and so on. Make sure your subject lines accurately describe the matter of the email before you categorize it.
Unsubscribe from Unwanted Emails Lists
Promotional messages are great and all but sometimes they can be the greatest contributor to the clutter in your inbox. They can be so many that the important messages are buried within them and it is harder for you to see the messages you should actually take seriously.
The best solution is to unsubscribe from such promotional emails, especially when you’re no longer interested in their emails or you simply don’t have the time to read those emails.
This you can also outsource, along with the handling of emails. You can have a service like 99papers to do this, which you can read about in this 99papers review.
The quickest way to process the unsubscribe action is to look for the “unsubscribe” link in the email itself. You can also search for the term “unsubscribe” in your email client search box and look for the ones you want to get rid of.
Conclusion
While email is a great tool that helps us run our businesses, it is important to have it under control, lest it ends up consuming large portions of our days that we won’t get back. With the tips above, you should be getting your email and your day back under your control.
About author
Susan Saurel is a full-time digital marketer and a part-time blog writer at essay writing service USA. Susan lives in Houston, Texas, but she spends most of her spare time traveling around the globe and meeting new people and cultures. As a passionate marketer, Susan is eager to share the professional experience with her readers.
