You are swamped every day at work and at home.
How do some of your business friends live stress free and fit it all in while you never have time to get things done? Don’t we all have the same 24 hours in a day?
Your overwhelmed feeling can change if you adopt a technique for dealing with email that will make your life simpler and more productive.
Are you excited to read on? This is not brain surgery, but simple techniques. You will wonder why you haven’t done these things sooner, and you’ll be amazed by the results as you suddenly have more free time (which we all want more of).
Take control of your inbox
Let’s start with the biggest issue plaguing us — yes, you guessed it, your emails. You better take control your inbox, because right now, your inbox has control of you!
Be honest: Do you check your email every time you see the words pop onto your screen or you hear that little chime noise?
And how many times do you check your mobile device during your work day? I assume a lot. Don’t you feel so pathetic when nobody has sent you a professional or personal email or text in the past 30 seconds?
My solution: Set up four folders
- Must Do
- Should Do
- Could Do
- Nice To Do
Go through your inbox and sort it into these four groups; the rest that doesn’t seem to fit, delete. Yes, delete it, as it is probably SPAM and stuff you don’t have to deal with.
By performing triage, you focus on the emails that matter most, the 20 percent that makes up the 80 percent of your productive workload.
The other categories should be self-explanatory.
Throughout the day (and this doesn’t mean every few minutes), read through incoming emails. I suggest taking a five-minute break every hour to quickly glance at incoming emails to see if any are important enough to require a quick response. Then, in the morning, evaluate the four folders and move items up to the next higher file folder.
You become more efficient, and your inbox magically empties out as you find you really don’t need to read every email.
The relevant subject line
This is a major time saver. Educate your office staff that every subject line must be relevant to the email. I hate when people just keep on pressing “reply” and the actual contents of the subject has 100 percent changed.
It is critical that you educate your internal staff, vendors, clients and even friends that you want relevant subject lines, which make the art of responding to important emails more timely. The subject line descriptor also helps me enormously when I’m trying to save emails into my folders (as outlined by its different topics).
Fear of missing emails
My daughter, who is attending her first year at the University of Michigan, educated me on a term I had never heard before: fear of missing out (FOMA). It’s when college students feel pressure to attend parties and be part of the scene.
Don’t let FOMA take over your life, and more importantly, don’t let “FOME” — fear of missing emails — take over your workday!
Time management only works if you follow through. Try this technique — you may like it. Now you have one email time-saving tool that lets you get more done, become more efficient, and still have time leftover to think of other time-saving strategies to make your days more efficient and peaceful.