Email Management Tips
Ugh! That is exactly what I think every morning when I finally decide to quit hitting the snooze button and turn the alarm off. I immediately reach over, grab my cell phone and see that I have 32 New Messages! I'm sure that a lot of you can relate to the overwhelming way this can start your day and to some of you my 32 e-mails pales in comparison to your 75-100+. It is so easy to shoot someone an e-mail rather than picking up the phone; and does anyone actually write letters anymore? It sure doesn't seem like it...nope - just shoot me a text, facebook me or send me an e-mail, right? It's so easy to communicate this way that we don't even have to take the time to fully formulate our thoughts, we can just send another e-mail to follow up. With today's technology we can easily become prisoners of this quick form of communication. When it comes to e-mail, we use Outlook (which I LOVE). If you utilize Outlook, those 32 or 100+ e-mails doesn't seem quite so daunting. Here are some tips that I use to help stay organized and stress free:
1) First off: don’t feel like you need to respond to every e-mail immediately. Use the tips below to organize them so that you can follow up when you have the time.
2) Utilize Folders to organize your e-mails, separating by project, client, employee, vendor, event, subject matter etc.
3) Create Rules to automatically send e-mails to folders based on who they are from or subject line. (This is not a good idea for e-mails that need a fast response because it may not show up in your default in-box on your smart phone)
4) Flag e-mails for follow up. You don’t have to drop what you’re doing and respond to an e-mail. Simply flag it so that it shows up in your follow up folder. This also makes it easy to visually see that you need to take care of something
5) Categorize your e-mails. Create a color code system to categorize your e-mails based on priority, personal, business, project etc. This makes locating e-mails for related events, vendors, subjects, etc. easy
6) Now that everything is organized and easy to find , choose a few times a day to set aside 20 minutes or so to go through emails and respond
If you utilize these tips, you will find it a lot easier to deal with all of your e-mails, stay organized and locate e-mails when you need to later.