Don’t let your emails drive you crazy

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Don’t let your emails drive you crazy

Whatever job you have, if it involves computers, then email will play a huge part in connecting with your customers and services providers.

Everyday tons of new messages will pour in and fill up your inbox with emails that you will need to read and reply to. A great amount of time will be spent reading emails and responding to them, breaking your concentration every time and inevitably making you less productive.

There are however several ways to make managing your emails easier:

Categorise your Mail

You probably already flag important emails but you can take it a step further by creating categories to keep on top of things.

Start off by creating specific groups to help organise your mail. This way you can split apart the emails that need your immediate attention and those of less importance.

Allocate times to answer emails

Every time a new email pops up you are likely to check it almost instantly, but by doing this you can break your concentration with your mind drifting from one task to the next.

Instead, allocate times throughout the day for you to check your mail and reply.

Prioritise

Once you’ve allocated certain times to check your inbox, you should start by scanning through your subject lines.

Break up the emails into three types of email –

1. Unimportant – these are emails that don’t need to be replied to (e.g. updates, newsletters or notifications)

2. Quick – emails that will only take a few seconds to reply to

3. Important – emails that require a little more thought before you respond

Start with the quick ones, if an email only takes a few moments to reply to, don’t put it off, just answer it and get it out of the way.

This will then leave you with more time to think about a response for the more important emails. Answering them in batches is the key as answering them one by one breaks up the flow and disrupts your work pattern.

Close it down

If you are working on something that needs your complete concentration, close your emails down. Otherwise emails will pop up in the background constantly distracting.

Delete or categorise

We are normally programmed to keep all mail just in case we have to refer back to it sometime in the future. However only half the mail or less that you receive will need referring back to.

Your emails shouldn’t be left in your inbox, either delete it or move it into a folder relevant to the email.

Turn off notification mail

Every social network sends out notification emails, some do it in moderation, some not so much. Chances are throughout the day you are likely to get quite a few of them and if you use these sites regularly you probably already know about the notifications.

Be sure to switch them off to avoid distractions as well as making your mailbox quieter and giving you less to scan over when you load up your email.

Check your spam folder regularly

The chances are you’ve missed out on an important email in the past because it’s fallen into the spam folder where you’ve over looked it.

No spam folder is perfect so be sure to scan through them daily to guarantee you don’t miss out on anything important.