Take note of these ten tips for managing email, and you will see how, with a little organization, everything flows with less stress.
Are you one of those who feels overwhelmed by the number of messages that appear in your email inbox? Do you especially notice it on dates such as Black Friday? Do you miss an important work email in the middle of other, insubstantial ones? It may not happen to you in such an exaggerated way, but sometimes you do feel that it is getting out of hand.
If so, don’t worry. There are some good habits you can adopt so this doesn’t happen to you. Take note of these ten tips for managing email, and you will see how, with a little organization, everything flows with less stress.
How to Organize Your Email?
Fill in the Subject Section
Surely it annoys you when you receive an email without having bothered to put what its content is about in the subject line. Do not do the same and cover exactly and concisely what the subject is that you are going to deal with in it. It will help the other person to know if it is urgent, if it has to do with work, or if it can wait until later.
In the same way, when you fill in the subject, it will make it easier for you to find the email in your sent folder or through the search engine. It will only take two seconds, so there’s no reason not to.
If it Takes Less than Two Minutes, Answer
If you are going to take less than two minutes to answer that email you received, do it now. Often, we simply have to confirm receipt, accept, or reject a proposal. If so, don’t delay. It will only take a few seconds, and you will not accumulate tasks or have to go through it again to see what that was.
Check the Mail Every Couple of Hours
Another trick to ensure that your workflow is not interrupted and for which it is not appropriate to have notifications at full volume is to check work email every couple of hours. That moment will be ideal to answer what is urgent, mark what is important as unread but what can wait, and eliminate the rest that refer to topics that you do not need to see again.
Classify the Messages
Most email accounts allow you to classify the messages in the inbox, so that he already takes care of separating them into the most important ones, which he will group to one side, and the less important ones.
Some accounts do it by default by detecting which ones we answer the most, such as important work and personal issues, and those others that it identifies as newsletters and various notifications, which it groups to one side. Distinguishing between one and the other will help you prioritize what is important, and the others will have to wait for you to look at them when you have some time.
Filter Unread Messages
In any case, if you want to go straight to your inbox and not miss any unread messages, filter by “unread “. You can even classify the ones you want in such a way that you can attend to them in more detail later.
Every couple of days, we recommend that, whatever method you follow, you filter the unread. If your email is up-to-date, nothing will happen because there won’t be any, but if you missed something by mistake, you’ll see it before too much time has elapsed. Also, don’t forget to check your spam folder. There may have been something going on for her that shouldn’t be there.
Use the Search Engine
The email search engine is as fast as it is effective, as long as you learn to use it properly. If your message archiving system is not updated or it has not seemed appropriate to adopt one, on days when you are in a hurry and need to look for something, it will save you time to resort to the search engine to locate the emails you need. You can filter the search between sent and received to eliminate options.
Delete the Messages
Digital cleaning is essential. It is not about deleting work emails, but all those that are not important, especially if we are talking about those from the supermarket, notifications of purchases that have already reached you and were charged correctly, advertising, etc.
All those emails that clutter your inbox and you don’t need to check again—throw them away. Do it at the same time you read them. Delete without further ado.
Archive the Mail
Organizing messages in folders is also very useful, especially when we talk about work issues. If you find it very tedious to do it as a daily routine or, simply, you do not realize it, reserve one day a week, every 15 days, or a month, to do a thorough cleaning of the mail and store in their respective folders what you do want to keep. It will be very practical if you have to consult one when time passes.
On the other hand, you do not need to overdo the folders. Try to have a few with very clear concepts, or you will spend more time than you should trying to decide which one to put that message from that family member who has commissioned you for a job. Labor? Familiar? Whichever categories you decide on, choose those that will be most practical for you and avoid copying the methods of others that may not work for you.
Mute Notifications
You silence email notifications so that they do not interrupt your work course or that free moment with your partner or family. As with social networks, it is advisable to select which notices to receive via email. If you have the option to schedule notifications to only ring at work, feel free to do so. And if you don’t want that to happen on the weekend, remember to also remove them on Fridays or Saturdays to reactivate them on Monday. Thus, avoid one of the most important thieves of time.
Use Two Email Accounts
Surely you already have two email accounts, one for work and the other for personal, but if this is not the case, we recommend that you open one to dedicate it solely to matters such as friends, family, and digital accounts, such as those of television platforms and online stores, as well as the newsletters to which you have signed up, and reserve the other exclusively for professional matters. You will save much more time than you can imagine.
