Have you ever came back to work on Monday only to spend your entire morning answering the huge onslaught of emails that are clogging up your inbox?
Are you tired of having 46 unread messages and after reading through them all realizing that only two are important?
Do your co-workers complain that you never respond to their messages?
If you need to improve your email system, here are some tips that will help:
Keep Your Work and Your Social Life Separate
If you use email for your work, you should have a separate address for your friends and family which you only check when you are at home so that you are not using up your valuable work time reading the funny chain emails that your Aunt Glenda forwards to you.
It will also help ensure that an important work message doesn’t get lost in all of your personal mail.
Unsubscribe From Mailing Lists
If you are in the habit of submitting your email to every website that you are mildly interested in, you likely wake up to an inbox filled with newsletters, updates, and direct mail advertising every morning.
If you want to cut down on this clutter, pick three or four websites that you find the most important to be subscribed to and unsubscribe from all the rest.
To get yourself taken off the mailing list, simply scroll to the bottom of the newsletter or email where you will likely find a link.
Create Folders
To keep your inbox organized, you can create folders so that you can sort your messages into different categories. This is easy to do on most email programs, such as Gmail or Hotmail.
Your folders could be divided by certain projects, people, groups, or topics.
Get in the habit of sending an email to the right folder as soon as you read it so that you will know where to find it.
Respond Right Away
The best way to deal with those urgent emails in your inbox is to answer them right there and then.
This way you can avoid letting them build up to the point where they become a huge task to answer.
If the email requires you to do a bit more research, send a response letting the sender know that you received their inquiry and then mark the email as unread until you deal with it.
These are just a few ways that you can simplify your email system and make your inbox more organized!