Do Something! Manage Your Email Inbox

I read something recently that indicated that by 2009, workers will spend up to 41% of their time at work managing their email. (Is that really possible?!) Another survey conducted last year on behalf of Fuser.com, found that internet users spend approximately 7 hours each week managing email and social networking accounts. That’s a significant amount of time. And it’s even more if you’re searching for important client emails or emails that contain information that you can’t seem to find anywhere else.

Some tips for managing your email:

• Think about what kinds or categories of email you receive. Are your emails mostly ‘conversational’ or are they reminders to take a specific action? Don’t let action emails get lost or buried;
• Create separate folders for client email and email that requires action;
• Set up rules and filters that will automatically place messages in the correct folder and help you to see at one glance whether you’ve got emails from clients that need to be addressed;
• If you get a lot of conversation-based email, you might want to sort your email by thread,  conversation or subject to help you follow the conversation, stay current and not repeat what others have already said;
• Know your priorities – which email relates to high value activities, clients or potential opportunities, and which email is less important? Deal with high value emails first;
• Change subject lines of emails to better reflect the topic being discussed and for easier sorting and searching in the future;
• As you go through your emails on a regular basis, you may have some information that you want to save simply for reference purposes or for review later. Categorize those emails the same way you’d categorize the information if it was on paper – separate it into folders and/or save it elsewhere on your computer, but get it out of your inbox.
• Once you’ve sorted important emails into folders, saved them to the client file and deleted them from your inbox, you’ll probably still have a lot of emails left over. Sort by date and delete the old ones which are probably the least important anyway;
• Create a schedule for reviewing and deleting email on a regular basis.