3 Life-saving Email Management Tips

If you are in a leadership role, then you are probably mostly struggling with a large influx of emails in your inbox. Just looking at the increasing number of unread emails, must be stressing you out. Worry no more. We are in this together and there are tricks to handle this.

Here are three email management tricks which will make your professional lives easier:

1. Limit the number of times you check your emails: Yes, emails are an effective medium of communication but we can't deny the fact they are extremely distracting. Checking emails regularly breaks the chain of thought and reduces productivity since each email is unique and directs your attention in multiple directions. So by limiting the number of times, you check your email, you can focus on your task at hand better. Fix this to once in the morning, once post lunch (if this frequency suits you).
2. Categorize: Emails come from all sources and expect many things out of you. Some need immediate attention whereas some can be deferred. Few can even be delegated and some can be, deleted (yes!). So categorizing them will make things much simpler and effective. Picture this! Instead of 50 unread emails, if you had 5 emails under the category 'action', 7 under the category 'waiting', 25 under 'information' and '13' under 'delegate', you would realise that you actually had to sort out/respond only 5 emails.
3. Email - Action Items: Now this is a tricky part. Few emails just need two minutes of your time but still remain pending for a long while along with other items which would require longer time and attention from you. The trick here is to glance through emails and respond immediately to the ones which require just a minute or two of your time. You can always add the remaining emails that need your longer attention to a 'to-do' list and work on it accordingly.

Just by applying these tricks, you will actually feel in control of the email 'tsunami' and your days will be spent more productively. Do share your handy tricks of email management. Thank you for reading my first Linkedin article. I will come back with more.