Emails! Get your inbox in order...

EMAILS – A big part of our daily working & social lives!  Here are a few tips to help you stay in control of your emails so you can boost your efficiency & not waste time:

• Have set times allocated in your dianry/daily routine to attend to email – dealing with them as they come in can take over your whole day & your other work falls by the wayside.  You may worry about people who know you as responding immediately – they will soon get used to waiting an hour or two.

2 or 3 half hour time slots a day is ideal, half hour first thing in the morning, half hour before lunch & half hour late afternoon before going home. 

If this is not suitable for you, try 4 or 5 x 15 minute slots to attend to emails: first thing in the morning, morning tea time, just before lunch time, afternoon tea time (with your cuppa, relax and go through your inbox) & late afternoon before closing office.

Your aim should be to keep only what needs to be attended to in your inbox

Now follow these steps:

• Open folders under your inbox with easy reference names for easy filing – have a ‘to read’ file for any news, articles or jokes that you can go back to during lunch time, tea time or when you have a spare moment.
• Start by quickly running through your inbox & delete any junk mail that you do not want to read.
• Then starting at the top of your inbox, open each email, deciding what you should do with each one:

1. Read & File (if you need it) / Delete (if you don’t need it)
2. Read at a later stage – file into the ‘to read’ folder for when you have allocated time for reading
3. Action immediately if it is a quick response – max of 2minutes & File / Delete
4. Action - delegate anything that you can by forwarding to the correct person with short, clear instructions, do not action an email on someone else’s behalf, you have your own work to do, flag if follow-up is required & File
5. Action at a later stage – prioritise using the category tags & flags & allocate a time slot later in the day or week – diarise that it needs to be actioned by a certain date – leave in the inbox as a daily reminder that you need to tend to this email
6. Delete anything not needed!
7. If you receive email to your mobile that you don’t need – Delete off your handset & pc  immediately - saves you looking at it twice & deleting it twice

• Unsubscribe to newsletters that you no-longer have time to read & no-longer find useful or interesting or relevant to your life at this time, this will eliminate a lot of email clutter.
• Being cc’d in on emails irrelevant to you can be prevented by letting the sender know that you do not need to receive those emails – especially in a company environment
• Sort emails in folders by conversation & delete previous emails but watch out for attachments & make sure all the conversations are on the one you keep.

A few more tips:

• Sending out less emails will reduce the incoming amount of emails – so think carefully when sending an email
• Keep emails short and be specific in your email to prevent back & forth emails eg; when setting up an appointment note a few times when you are available & they can select a time slot
• Sort your sent items as you would your inbox – it should be emptied daily, completed emails filed, emails still to be actioned further or waiting for a response, drag & drop into your inbox
• Remember to use the ever useful ‘search’ tool when looking for an email instead of scrolling through all the folders
• Decide for what period you should keep emails – delete or archive the very old ones
• Never have the time to organise your emails – allocate time in your diary, you won’t be sorry...