10 Ways to Superb Email Productivity!

Author: admin | Filed under: Personal Productivity | Tags: Email, Personal Productivity, Technqiues | No Comments »

One of the biggest prob­lems we are fac­ing today is han­dling big quan­ti­ties of infor­ma­tion. Our tech­nol­ogy and access to infor­ma­tion is elec­tri­fy­ing but it is a double-edged foil. It fills our minds and our lives with mud­dle.   The chal­lenge is to sort, fil­ter, orga­nize, drop and assim­i­late the big amounts of infor­ma­tion we are exposed to on a day-to-day basis. So what are we to do? Here are a cou­ple of things I have proven to help me man­age my mail better.

1. Don’t Check Mail Every Few Minutes

This is a tough one, but it is much bet­ter and you will stay more tar­geted on your present work if you are not con­sis­tently check­ing for new mail. If you’ve a direct con­nec­tion and your mail is deliv­ered auto­mat­i­cally, you can still wait to respond each 2 hours or so. By allot­ting a par­tic­u­lar time to read and answer, you may def­i­nitely gain efficiency.

2. Flag Mes­sages for Later Action

You got things to work on now.  Do what you’ve planned for the day.  Flag the mes­sage for later action.  In this way, you can fully focus on read­ing and respond­ing to it at a later time.

3. Cre­ate Folders

Nowa­days, most email pro­grams allow you to cre­ate fold­ers to sort your mail. This usu­ally makes find­ing mes­sages much eas­ier and helps you sort spec­i­fied tasks/email chains into a sin­gle folder for eas­ier reference.

4. Set up Rules

Most email pro­grams will allow you to sort your email auto­mat­i­cally when you received it.  This is achieved based on set of rules you estab­lish such as the con­tent, the sender’s email address, the address to which it’s sent, etc.  With the filtering/sorting in place, it leaves the main inbox less clut­ter and helps you sort out your emails in their spec­i­fied folder immediately.

5. Deal with Sim­i­lar Responses All At Once

By sort­ing your mail using the meth­ods described above, you save time by not being made to look up the same infor­ma­tion all over again.  There­after, you can deal with the sim­i­lar mes­sage all at once.  Fur­ther­more, some emails con­sist of sends and receives which can be read at one shot with the final email that you received.

6. Tem­plates

Use tem­plates and sig­na­tures.  They’ll save you oodles of time for those responses that require the same or sim­i­lar infor­ma­tion on a reg­u­lar basis.

7. Cut, Copy, Paste

Save typ­ing time with Cut, Copy and Paste.  One of the pow­er­ful fea­tures of today’s oper­at­ing sys­tems and office apart­ments is the power to cut and paste – some­times mul­ti­ple pieces of infor­ma­tion trans­ferred from one doc­u­ment to another.   If you do not under­stand how to use this fea­ture, learn today.

8. Make Heavy Use of the Delete Key

Dump data by hit­ting the “Delete” key.  That’s the best way to save space on your mailbox.

9. Archive Emails

If you are not intend­ing to delete what­ever is in your mail­box, try archiv­ing the emails.  It helps you keep all the email exchanges and you never know when you need to refer back again.

10. Cus­tomize Your Program

Most peo­ple use only 20–30% of an email program’s capa­bil­ity.  Have you con­sider improv­ing the capa­bil­ity usage to 50%? Invest­ing some time in learn­ing more of the fea­tures of your email pro­gram and then cus­tomiz­ing it to work the way YOU want it, and you’ll mar­vel at your added productivity

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