HOW MANY EMAILS ARE IN YOUR INBOX RIGHT NOW?
AND IF THEY COULD BE MAGICALLY CLEARED AWAY, HOW MANY WOULD BE THERE TOMORROW MORNING, OR IN A WEEK?
If we’re not careful our inbox can get pretty cluttered — and very quickly. As email remains the go-to communication channels for most professionals (nearly a billion professional email accounts and 5% on the rise every year), it’s not unheard of to receive upwards of 200 emails/day. This can add a fair amount of stress to your daily “must-do” list.
Thankfully, a good workflow to manage the email helps immensely, and the hard-earned tips below have significantly improved my productivity while in the inbox (spending about 1/2 as much time there as last year!).
I hope these tips help you as much as they did me. Feel free to leave a comment below on how you’ve hacked your inbox!
1) 100 emails is easier to process than 200
To cut your email in your inbox in 1/2, consider filtering all of your newsletters, internet deals, blog subscriptions etc. You can do so manually, but I suggest you check out unroll.me / sanebox to do so automatically. These services give you a daily update on all of these “less important” emails, and also make it easy for you to unsubscribe from any email that you don’t need (which you really should do with anything you don’t click on once a week).
2) Drop the saying “check my email”
PROCESS it. For every new email in your inbox, there should be 4 possibilities
- reply immediately (and quickly)
- delegate to a colleague
- star it for later (if the reply will take too long or if it’s not important now)
- or delete/archive
3) Your inbox is not your home.
This could be the biggest change you can make with your email habits. Avoid “sitting in your inbox” and just make it one other workflow that you process a few times a day. WHY? When you sit in your inbox and react to emails as they come in, you’re bouncing between tasks and multi-tasking has been shown to not be productive for 98% of people!
My personal rule is to not process email more than once every hour. Try it. You might be surprised at what you find!
4) Shortcuts are your friends
Fly through your inbox with shortcuts like these and check out this introductory post with some of the most useful shortcuts to make into a habit. AND, habits aren’t easy to develop if you don’t repeat them regularly, so send the post just mentioned to yourself everyday with this nifty trick—->
Email [email protected] (a very cool reminder service) and review the gmail shorcut tips until you got ‘em down. You’ll be LIGHTNING QUICK!!!
5) Reply to (almost) every email in less than 2 minutes
Keep your replies direct, succinct and hopefully less than 5 sentences which’ll save you and your contacts time. If not possible, star the email to deal with it later, and process the rest of your inbox first.
Here’s a great post explaining the 2 minute rule and general zero inbox logic.
6) Deal with NOW not later.
If it’s something you’ll need to handle at a specific time, or if you need to follow-up with someone later, DON’T let it sit in your inbox distracting you… BOOMERANG it.
- This brilliant tool from Baydin allows you to choose when something comes back into your inbox so that project that you don’t have time for this week can be back in your workflow next week. Even better, say you want to make sure that someone replies to your email, you can send it with boomerang and if they don’t reply, that email will come back into your inbox 2 hours, 2 days, 1 week later so you can follow up and make sure things move forward.
- They also have a Send Later function where you can choose at what specific time to send an email to your contacts. Why? Emails are more likely to be read right after lunch, or early in the AM (as they’re at the top of the inbox).
- This becomes really handy when you’re exchanging with folks from different times zones; for my work at Evercontact, we have clients based in every time zone you can imagine so timing a conversation with them is a bit more complicated… but less so with send later!
7) Don’t be afraid to delete and archive everything that’s done.
Delete, delete, delete anything that won’t matter to you in the future. For the rest, set up the “send and archive” button so that once you’ve dealt with something, it’s out of your inbox.
READY FOR A CHALLENGE? Take the time to test at least one of these tips this week and let me know how it goes. Or shoot off a comment below on how you rock out your inbox as we all have lots to learn!
