Real World tips to help you manage your Email more effectively.
Email is one of the most prevalent forms of communication in this day and age. The below Email productivity tips will help you to manage your inbox more effectively.
One of the things I realized throughout my corporate life was that my email inbox was never ending. Like a book that just kept on writing itself and never ever seemed to finish. The minute you think you are done in comes another one.
The other thing I noticed is that there seem to be 3 main types of people when it comes to email. Those who reply right away, and their email box is always empty. The others that get to it at some point but at least get to it. Then there are those who are always meaning to get to it and their inbox count looks like a 6-figure salary. All these people exist somewhere within the company you work for and there seems to be little correlation between success and how email is managed.
There is no right or a wrong way to managing email. There are however ways to make managing email a lot easier for yourself though.
Here are some tips and time savers that I picked up and used during my many years in corporate that may work for you.
1. Schedule time in your calendar to read and reply to email.
This is included in every bit of advice that you will ever read about email efficiency and makes sense. That is if you are not the person that replies right away and insists on an empty email box. If you are that person fear not. You are on the opposite end of the other extreme. The person who never replies and he / she still works there. Block out time in your diary to read and reply to email and stick to those times. People will very quickly get used to you not replying immediately and if its urgent they will call or come find you. Much like they do with your counterpart. If you are the person that gets to it at some point or the one that doesn’t ever get to your mail. Doing this will give you some structure and time to be able to manage your mailbox more easily.
2. Action what you can do now.
When you are going through your email at your allotted time, and you come across an email you can answer right away. Answer it and get it out of your mailbox. Clear out what you can as soon as you can. In the next step we will discuss what to do with emails that you need to respond to later.
3. Create a filing system.
Everyone has a different method of filing emails that they need to keep. There is no right or wrong way to do this. Create a filing system that makes sense to you. There are a few recommendations I have that can help. The first is don’t make your filing system to deep. Try to keep it to maximum one or two levels. Most email tools have excellent search functionality, and, in my experience, I found what I was looking for by using search more often than when I tried to find it manually. The next recommendation I have is create separate PST files as these files can get very large. Finally, I recommend at minimum creating an Action Later and a Follow Up folder.
4. Make your Email work for you.
Did you create your Action Later and Follow Up folder? I am a forgetful chap and often early on in my career I would forget to follow up on an important task or query. I would send off a request to someone, they wouldn’t respond, and I would forget about it. The way I overcame this was by setting myself some simple automated rules. Here is what you need to do:
- Create a new rule and call it Follow Up.
- Set the rule to move any sent item with [F] in the body to your Follow Up folder. (You can replace the F with anything you like as long as its unique)
- Now create another rule and call it Action Later.
- Set this rule to move any sent items with [A] in the body to your Action Later folder. (You can replace the A with anything you like as long as its unique)
Now all you need to do when you reply to or send a new mail you need to follow up on or Action Later is to place either [F] or [A] into the body somewhere. I used to put it under the signature. A copy of this mail will then go into the relevant folder you created. If you want to go a step further, you can set the same rule for items received. Now any reply you get on an email you flagged will move to the specified folder as well. You could go another level up and start adding follow up flags and tasks if you really want to, but I would only do this for the bigger projects or deals you are working on.
5. Create Quick Steps.
Quick Steps in outlook are another massive time saver. There are a lot of mails you may need to keep and moving them to the right folder can be time consuming and annoying. The solution is to create Quick Steps. Quick steps are an easy way to set one click rules to perform a task like moving an email to a specific folder. There are a multitude of rules you can set with quick steps. You can flag mails for follow up, assign them to tasks etc. Keep it simple for now. What are the most common categories of email you are getting that you keep moving to the same folders? Create a quick step for each of these. Now when you need to move something you just click the quick step and the email is filed.
6. Create Quick Parts
Are you getting the same question or request repeatedly and each time you are having to type out a similar response? An easy way to solve for this is to use Quick Parts. The beauty is you can create these for future use whilst you are typing your response.
Here is how:
- Type out your response to whomever it may be.
- When done with your mail and before you click send select the portion of the body that you want to reuse and add it to your Quick Parts. You only want to keep the reusable part and not the person’s name and any small talk etc.
Now every time you get the same request you can go to Insert – Quick Parts and simply insert your preformatted text and click send.
7. Delay your responses.
Have you ever sent and email and then remembered you forgot to add something? Maybe you felt you could have replied kindlier or phrased your email differently? Even worse you added the wrong contact. Too late now it’s gone, and we all know recall isn’t really recall. It is time to set another rule. This time create a rule to delay all sent messages by 5 to 10 minutes. This way when you click send the email will only leave your outbox in 5 to 10 minutes time and you have time to reword and tweak if necessary. If you want to you can amend the rule slightly to send messages marked as urgent immediately.
8. Managing vacation mail.
I am sure you have come back from a long vacation and your mailbox is full. Where do you start? First things first always put an Out of Office message on so as that people know not to expect an immediate reply. Secondly always add alternate or backup contacts to your out of office message. Once you are back, create a Folder called Vacation and move all the mails in your inbox to that folder. The reason for doing this is so as that you can concentrate on new emails and requests coming in. Also, if someone really requires something urgently, they will have paid attention to your return date and will usually resend their mail on your return. You can now work through your vacation folder at a more reasonable pace.
Or….Simply delete them:
There is another way to manage vacation mails. It is a little bit controversial, and I will let you decide if you want to try it. Whenever I came back from vacation, I would follow the previous recommendation and I began to notice something. Almost all the requests sent to me during the time I was away had been sorted out or had lost their relevance. They required no action. Makes you wonder if there is not a method to the madness for the people that don’t respond. Right? Here it is: When you write your out of office message you state something like this:
“I am currently out of the office until [DATE] and will not be able to respond to any emails. Should your request not be resolved or needs my urgent attention please resend your email to me on my return.”
Now when you get back to the office you simply delete the mails in your inbox. I do recommend scanning the internal communications and checking there is nothing important that you need to read. Everything else delete and you are done. Give it a try.
Resource Links:
Below I have included links to some How To resources that will help you with setting up rules, Quick Parts and Quick Steps in outlook. There are plenty of resources across the web with many examples on how to do this.
Email management is a personal preference, and you need to do what makes sense to you. I hope the above Email productivity tips have been helpful and provided you with some ideas you can implement.
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Until next time.
Rob
“Email is a system that delivers other people’s priorities to your attention. It’s up to you to decide when that priority should be managed into your world. It’s not the other way around.” – Chris Brogan
