Spending too much time hanging out on Social Media is closing in fast, but wasted time on email management is still the number one productivity drain.
Most of us simply have to spend time on email communication daily—it’s how we manage staff and projects, it’s how we interact with clients, it’s where the rubber meets the road.
Productivity experts recommend NOT opening your email program first thing when you start your work day. Instead, work on an important project for the first hour of your day to be sure you get a significant chunk of work done before you enter the email rabbit hole.
When it is time to check in with email, there are a few things you can do to streamline your work.
- If you can, handle an item the very first time you see it and then DELETE it. “Handling an item” can be as simple as responding to a meeting request or providing a piece of information. Once you’ve scheduled the meeting and/or given the info, delete that baby.
- If you can’t handle an item the first time you see it, file it away so it’s not in your general inbox space and schedule time to work on it later.
- Route personal correspondence to a separate folder – schedule time when you’ll work on personal items.
- Route web purchase confirmations, marketing messages, and newsletter subscriptions to folders outside of your inbox – delete or unsubscribe as appropriate.
- Shoot for having your general “inbox” area essentially empty by the end of every work day.
I’ve followed those general practices for years and clients consistently comment that they are very pleased with the timely responses they receive from me and I have peace of mind because I know that nothing is falling through the cracks. My items are completed, deleted, or scheduled for the future.
Of course, it’s easier said than done. All those handy tips take time, too, right? I recently started using a tool called Mailstrom that is making my email inbox management even more streamlined and in far less time.
While I have multiple email addresses, they all route into a single gmail account. I strongly recommend this tactic for managing your email if you’re not already doing this. Then, sign up for Mailstrom with this single gmail account. There is a small annual fee for this service, but you can try it out for free and you will immediately see its power.
Mailstrom allows you to:
1) Clear through the clutter by purging your email lists. You can unsubscribe from multiple email lists all at once. Or, you can completely block particular lists from your inbox. If you’re not sure, you want to unsubscribe, you can use the “expire” function to remove emails from your inbox after a day or two if you don’t get around to reading them.
2) Use the “chill” function. If you’re not ready to reply quickly and also don’t want to pause in your work flow to schedule a future occasion to work on an the item in question, simply click “chill” and mailstrom will hide the item from you for the length of time you specify before putting in back in your inbox.
3) Create rules to automatically route emails directly into specific folders. The rule creation wizard is easier than Outlook, gmail, or any other rule-creation tool.
4) Check the “People I’ve Emailed” tab first when you open Mailstrom and you can be certain not to miss any messages from the people you email with the most.
5) Get notifications that tell you how much time you saved. Yes, it’s an extra email, but I love getting the notice that I saved 44 minutes on email management in a given week. One week Mailstrom estimated that I saved 5 hours just due to the number of emails that were automatically handled from me by rules, unsubscribes, etc. that I’d set up inside Mailstrom.
6) Get a Weekly Inbox report that shows you how many emails you received and removed by day.
If you have any clutter in your email inbox that you’d like to clear away, do the free trial and clean out some of that junk! The free trial allows you to load up to 5,000 emails and delete up to 1250 of them to get a feel for how Mailstrom works.
If you decide to make the small investment that will save you hours on email every week, this link will save you $5.