These tips will make your life easier:
1. Clean up your mailbox
Your goal is to ensure that by the end of the day, your mailbox should be as empty as possible. For that you can use the CAD rule, Classify, Act, Delete. Classify your emails in order of importance. Try to sorting in the following way: What is essential and urgent, What is not essential and non-urgent, What is not for me, and What is important and requires time for processing? If it takes you less than two minutes to read through an email and be able to give a short answer, do it immediately. Once processed an email is deleted or retained in a folder according to its degree of importance.
2. Use colors to prioritize
Using colors to label your messages will allow you to identify emails that concern you, those where you are on a copy, or from the leaders of the company.
3. Have a plan
Once you arrive at the company, read all your emails and establish between 1 and 3 times more during the day to check your mailbox. This allows you to be more productive in your work as you avoid wasting time checking for new emails every 5 minutes. Likewise, this will allow you to have a proactive attitude toward your messages instead of being overwhelmed by them. Disable alerts (visual or audio), they only generate a temptation to interrupt what you are doing and check the mail, while generating more stress. Except for trades that need warranting continued attention to electronic messages.
4. Clean up useless newsletters
Not all newsletters deliver value. Some of them seem to be intended to fill our mailbox of unread emails. If during the last, let's say, 3 weeks, the newsletters do not provide you with relevant information or get your attention to read them, feel free to click on "unsubscribe."
5. Use your work e-mail for WORK
We must keep our business mail from being overwhelmed by our private lives. To accomplish this, we need to identify those who use our email for this type of communication. Then we can create rules to filter and redirect these emails to our private accounts. This is how you can do it in Hotmail and Gmail.
6. Learn how to use your e-mail
Most people do not use the basic functions of messaging, such as keyword search or automatic classification of messages into folders (Filters). From time to time, you need to spend a few minutes in the help section of your account, and you'll be surprised how many things you can do and how simple they are to implement.
7. Be clever when going on vacations
Use auto-replies, informing your audience about your periods of absence, including dates, and someone to contact if needed. Your audience will understand that they will not be able to contact you via email, which will reduce the number of messages waiting for you in your mailbox. To reduce the stress of returning to operation after vacations, try setting your return date in your auto replay, to one or two days after your effective resumption of work. This allows you to work offline and sort everything out in peace. As you reply to emails, you can announce your return.
8. Get to the point
When replying to a message you should be concise, especially in a business setting. If e-mail exchanges stretch, do not hesitate to take the phone, and clarify, if necessary, a create folder for a particular conversation or person. Verbal communication saves time.
9. Acknowledge and set a deadline
Take the time to acknowledge the receipt, for those messages that require further processing or a time of reflection, telling your interlocutor the time of your response. The habit of planning your response allows you to reduce the number of incoming emails and the amount of time you will use to process the same message, as it will enable you to avoid getting constant reminders.
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