Its been a few years now that I start my day by checking e-mails and I am sure this will be a quite common habit for most of us. Because of this habit, I experienced that my day usually derived by incoming e-mails instead of as planned.
When I tested it, I found out that I could be lot more productive if I stick to my plan and avoid distraction by incoming e-mails.
Generally, if you are in business you get lots of e-mails on a daily basis and you should be really good at managing it otherwise, it gets really hard to work better. Challenge here is that you don’t have much time in a day to check all the e-mails on the other hand, you don’t want to miss any important e-mail because any single e-mail could be a big business opportunity.
Basically what we all want is to spend less time on sorting important e-mails, Isn’t?
For this purpose I found the following solutions, you can check these out below and might work for you as well and if you have a better option please don’t forget to share in the comments below.
Gmail E-mail Client
This is one of the best thing I found to manage my e-mails. You can replace outlook with Gmail e-mail client. You can send and receive all your e-mails using Gmail.
- I receive all my personal and business e-mails in Gmail
- I send all my e-mails using Gmail
- Outlook was only accessible on my system, Gmail can be accessed from anywhere using internet.
- Gmail Lab has really cool features which you can add to your e-mail client
Set Time
E-mails were one of my top distractions at work. I used to open the e-mails as I received and often ended up wasting lots of time which was not planned.
Since I set a fix time to check the e-mails I got really productive and manage to finish my planned work. I usually check my e-mails three times a day, morning, afternoon and in the evening for 15 Min each.
There are few people says you should not check your e-mails first thing in the morning and you get really productive. They say check your e-mails in the afternoon or in the evening once you have completed your day plan. It is a really good idea but I think it depends on what type of business you are in.
Because if you are in a really fast passé business you might need to answer the e-mails as arrived otherwise you could loose potential business, so set time to check e-mails which best suits your work environment.
Zero Inbox Policy
I think most of us can relate to this, neat and clean inbox with no e-mails to check is becoming a dream now. I have a zero inbox policy as well and work really hard to achieve that but most of the time it is not possible :). Here are the few things I do to achieve zero inbox:
- Delete all un wanted e-mails straight away
- Un subscribe immediately from all un wanted e-mail lists
- Reply all the important e-mails straight way or create folders to deal it later
Automate Messages
Gmail has a great label feature which you can use to set a criteria to automate your messages into certain folders. Which is really a great time saver for certain type of messages which you can filter and save in the folders to check whenever you need them.
Always looking for creative ideas for saving time and getting more productive. I am sure there are lots of creative people out there, feel free to leave a comment to ask or share anything .
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