How to Manage Your E-Mail

How many emails are stored in YOUR email in-box? Take a count, and let me know!

Do you use your email inbox as a to-do-list, but are having difficulty taking action or following up on tasks from the original emails? This is most likely because you have hundreds or even thousands of items cluttering up your inbox, and have trouble locating the specific email you are looking for.

Here are some tips for managing your email:

Don’t look at email as soon as it arrives. Set particular times to check your incoming messages. Such as in the morning, early afternoon and late afternoon. Opening up emails all day long is disruptive to your daily schedule, and can cause you to lose focus and be less effective at your job, or the things you have planned to do during the day. Turn off any automatic incoming email sound alerts. If there is an emergency, the person trying to get in touch will call you.

• There are three actions you can take with an email. You can answer it, file it, or delete it. If the email refers to a long term task you are working on, move it to a folder labeled ‘task list’ and note when you need to work on it.

Keep email only if it is essential. Keeping non-essential emails produces clutter in your inbox.

• To stay organized, create e-folders for certain projects, customers or categories. Move emails that pertain to each category into their specific folder to access at a later time. Searching through hundreds of emails in your inbox is time consuming.

Make separate personal and business email accounts to prevent cluttering up your main email account with things that will distract you and lower effectiveness.


2 thoughts on “How to Manage Your E-Mail

  1. Turning off incoming mail alerts has really helped me!

    I’m surprised you didn’t mention email filters, which organize your email into folders based on the sender or subject line. This also lets you put off reading messages that are unlikely to require action, such as coupon offers or messages from certain mailing lists.

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