It’s time.
Time to get on top of your inbox. For good.
They’re an essential part of everyday life – in work and life admin – but managing them, reading them, replying to them and actioning them can all be a huge time drain. We’ve become slaves to our inboxes and it can sometimes get in the way of doing the actual work.
I’m one of the worst offenders. But given the nature of my work, that’s no surprise as my email is active all day. What comes in and how I respond to these can dictate my changing workflow on a daily basis, plus a huge chunk of my work is on the customer service side for clients, so responding to emails is part of the job.
From my experience of dealing with hundreds of emails each week when in my client roles, I’ve employed a few failsafe tricks that help me keep on top of my inbox which I’ll share with you here.
Time-block your email time
Set times each day to check your inbox. This may seem so obvious, but scheduling time to check your emails each day puts you in control and is a simple step to free you from the notification/reaction interruptions to your actual work.
Be realistic about the amount of time that you will need and stick to it. It might suit you better to have several slots throughout the day depending on volume. But by keeping it within a defined amount of time, you will be able to focus on the task and make clear decisions for dealing with each email.
When you’re away from your inbox, turn off the notifications so they don’t interrupt you. As my friend Sandra once put it – you only check the post once a day, when the postman drops it off, so why don’t we do that with notifications and email? Because most of us are now seeing ridiculously unrealistic expectations about response times on email.
The 4Ds – Delete, do, defer, delegate
When you’re at your inbox, go through your mail on the preview screen and prioritise keeping in mind the 4Ds.
Delete
On the first pass of your inbox, go through and delete any spam or unwanted emails. Remember to unsubscribe from any unwanted emails where you can.
Do
Check any FYI type emails, these can be read and filed very quickly. Any that require an urgent reply can be flagged to deal with asap or do them straight away.
Defer
Non-urgent emails or items that require careful thought, consideration or careful reading can be flagged to follow up – create a task on your project management tool or make use of the follow-up task features available on email clients, so you’ll get a reminder when you need to deal with it.
Delegate
Any emails that need to be dealt with by someone else, send them on their way.
Set up repeat replies and repeat actions
For many people, there is a degree of repetition when it comes to email. If you find yourself writing the same thing again and again, then it may be useful to set up a few generic emails in your draft folder or make use of Quick Parts (on Outlook) or Canned Emails (in Gmail). These can then be edited to meet the specific needs of the individual response without having to craft the reply from scratch each time.
Quick Steps are another useful tool to use. These are pre-set actions that you can select to respond to an email. For example, I could create a Quick Step that would forward the email to a specific group of people with pre-populated text and at the same time file the original email in a destination folder for my future reference.
Organise with tags, folders and follow-ups
Make use of your email folders and tag features to categorise emails and make it easy to find old emails if you need to. Preferences can even be set to assign specific emails to specific folders as they come in, which keeps your inbox even clearer. I do this for notifications that come in from shared file storage tools, these automatically get filtered off into an ‘Updates’ folder as I know I’ll get a notification in my workspace if anything’s been assigned to me.
It’s definitely worth getting tough with your inbox and investing a little bit of time setting up some automation where you can so you’re not constantly slaving away. The Quick Parts and Drafts are my saviour each day as these allow me to quickly recreate commonly used or even intricate responses so that I don’t need to start from scratch each time. So useful for simple acknowledgement or confirmation emails or for repeated tricky topics where accuracy is essential. And remember, auto-replies aren’t just for holidays and days off. Why not make use of them to help manage response expectations?