Email management is a major source of overwhelm for many solo business owners; I only have to read my new subscriber notices every day to know this! When I ask my subscribers what their biggest office headache is, email is right up there with the rest of them! Comments such as:
"Email - yikes!"
"Responding to emails"
"Managing email"
"Email overload"
Do those sound familiar?
By cleaning up the flow of email messages into your inbox, you can then improve the flow of your business, and spend your time more productively.
Below I am going to share with you my top 7 tips for effectively managing your email, so you can break out of your email jail.
1. Most email messages are not urgent! Don't feel you have to read and act upon an email message the second it hits your inbox. You don't! It isn't urgent. If there was a real emergency, your client/colleague/friend would call you.
2. Are all those newsletters you subscribe to really necessary? Probably not! If this is the case, spend some time going through them and unsubscribing to the ones you don't really want or read.
3. Do incoming email messages play a distracting alert, such as an audible sound? If so, disable it. This is a distraction and you could quite easily stop what you're working on to go and check your email. It will then take you some time to get back on track again, not to mention the amount of time you've just lost stopping what you were doing, reading your email messages, and taking action on them.
4. Schedule set times to check your email. Once or twice a day is enough, say first thing in the morning and again later in the day. If you subscribe to various industry groups, save reading those email messages until you take a break from your work, maybe at the end of the day when you're winding down. You can easily get sidetracked reading all the different topics and replying to them, all of which are taking you away from your paid work.
5. Utilize email filtering tools. Set up folders and filters so your email messages get sent to the appropriate folder as soon as it arrives. This makes organizing and reading your email messages a cinch. You can then decide how to focus your time reading certain email messages. For example, all email messages that have gone into your "networking groups" folder can be saved to read later, however email messages which have gone into your "clients" folder can be acted on straight away.
6. Create email templates to save time. If you're finding you are responding to the same questions over and over again, create an email template. Next time you get asked the same or similar question, simply open your email template, add the person's email address, and hit send!
7. Run auto-archive regularly. If your email software comes with an auto-archiving feature, you need to run this regularly; at least once a month, so your email folder doesn't become too large. And let's face it, do you really need to keep email messages that are more than six to twelve months old?
If you follow these 7 tips above, you will find you are spending less time worrying about and checking your email, and more time on being productive, which will be better for your bottom line.
(c) 2008 Tracey Lawton
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About the author: Office Organization Expert, Tracey Lawton, is the creator of Easy Office Organization, a fixed-term membership program that will take you from overwhelmed to organized in 48 hours or less. Read more about it and grab your copy now >>
