10 Easy Email Tips That Will Save You An Hour A Day!

If you want to start saving an hour a day or more, start following these recommendations now.

Start today and you’ll soon see a big improvement in the amount of free time you have.

1. Consider Your Inbox to be a V.I.P. Room

The first thing we want to recognize is that your Inbox isn’t a house party.

It’s a V.I.P. room.

Only important emails are granted access.

Your focus is to prevent emails you don’t need to read from entering the V.I.P. room.

Your email application has many features to help.

If your email application is one of your most frequently used applications, doesn’t it make sense for you to learn as many time-saving features as possible?

2. Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe!

Your goal should be to have only emails delivered to your Inbox that you actually need to read.

Click the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of newsletters you never read.

That newsletter that you glance at every month and think someday you’ll read, unsubscribe from that, too.

You can always subscribe again.

Since most newsletters are sent once a month, expect to invest the next month unsubscribing to newsletters.  You’ll probably be surprised to learn how many newsletters are emailed to you every month.

If you really can’t bear to unsubscribe from a newsletter or you don’t want to offend someone you know by unsubscribing to their newsletter (they may see your name in their report of people who unsubscribed), refer to the section in this article on how to automatically move emails to folders.  You can create a folder called “Newsletters” and automatically move newsletters from your Inbox to your “Newsletters” folder or even your “Deleted Items” folder.

One caveat on unsubscribing: Avoid unsubscribing to suspicious emails.  It may lead to a website with malicious code or you are confirming to a spammer that your email address is active.  If you suspect that unsubscribing from a suspicious newsletter may create more issues, then create a rule to automatically delete the newsletter.

3. Use the Delete Key

Your Inbox is not a junk drawer.  Every item in your Inbox should have a compelling reason for being there.

Remember that time a year ago when Mary sent you an email asking, “Do you have any paperclips?” and you responded “No”?

(BTW…I think we both know you actually had some paperclips.)

Why didn’t you delete that email?

Why are you saving emails that you will NEVER need to refer to?

Make friends with the Delete key.  It’s o.k.

At the end of the day your Inbox should have no more than ten emails for the entire day.  I like to try for five emails.  Everything else is either deleted of filed away.  Mainly deleted.

We all want to produce the email out of thin air that vindicates us when wrongfully accused by some wrongful accuser!  However, when you fill your Inbox with emails you never need, it hinders you from being able to glance over those emails for the past few days that are important and may need a second read.

Every time you read an email ask yourself “Will I ever need to refer to this email again?” and err on the side of “no”.

4. Move Emails to Folders

Some people find managing email folders to be more work.

It’s not.

Create folders for people or companies you regularly communicate with and move important emails to the relevant folders, and then delete the rest.

You’ll be forced to ask yourself “Will I ever need this email or should I just delete it?”

It’s simple to create a folder.

And, save yourself a lot of work by having most of those emails automatically moved to relevant folders by using “Rules”.

 5. Automatically Move Unimportant Emails to Folders

This might be the most important section of this article.

Remember, your goal should be to have only emails delivered to your Inbox that you actually need to read.

We want to minimize the amount of time you need to spend reading, moving and deleting emails. 

You can easily create Outlook “rules” to automatically move unimportant emails to specific folders, so you can read them whenever you need to.  When Outlook sees an email from a particular sender, a rule will automatically move the email from your Inbox to a folder you specify.

However, I recommend that you do not create rules to automatically move important emails from your Inbox.  Some people will create rules to automatically move emails from a client to a folder named after the client’s company.  Then, they need to remember to review that folder for important emails.

Remember the V.I.P. room?  Your Inbox should be the central location for important unread emails.  Once you read an email, then move it to a folder, if you prefer.

Here is an example of how to automatically move receipts from online stores from your Inbox to a “Receipts” folder.  Without the rule, every time a receipt is delivered it is one more unnecessary email in your Inbox.  Most people buy items from Amazon.  Let’s create an Outlook rule to move Amazon receipts to a folder called receipts.

You’ll need an Amazon receipt in your Inbox.  If you don’t have an Amazon receipt, then a receipt from any online store will do.

1.       Create a folder named “Receipts” by right-clicking your email address at the top-left panel in Outlook, and then select “New Folder…”.

2.       Type “Receipts” and press enter.

3.       Go to your Inbox and locate a receipt from Amazon.com.

4.       Right-click the email, and then left-click Rules > Always move messages from: Amazon.com.

5.       Choose the “Receipts” folder, and then click OK.

That’s it!

Create folders and rules to move other emails that you don’t necessarily need to read.

6. Think “Text Messaging”

Avoid writing lengthy emails.  Attention spans are not what they used to be.  Most emails shouldn’t be much longer than the length of a text message.

You may spend a half-hour or longer crafting the perfectly worded email, but after a few sentences the reader is thinking about other things.  Get to your point as quickly (and politely) as possible.

Also, avoid asking the recipient to answer more than two questions per email, and whenever possible, try to make it one question per email.  The more questions you include in an email, the more likely you’ll need to follow-up with emails to get answers to those questions that were overlooked or ignored.

7. Use the Phone

There are times when just making a two-minute phone call can save a lot of wasted time with back-and-forth emails.

You can email something like, “Rosco, do you have time for a call now?  I think we can address this matter much faster with a brief phone call, rather than a number of back-and-forth emails.”

8. Let Others Have the Last Word

Every email does not require a response.

When you respond to an email, often the recipient responds back, thereby creating another distracting email for you to read…and, respond to.

Sometimes no response is the best response, particularly when a number of people are included on an email and they “Reply All” with valuable contributions like “Yay!!!”

Refuse to yay.

9. Use Signatures

Remember…computers should save us from performing repetitious work.

Most people use signatures for just their contact information, but signatures can be used for typical responses you write to emails.

In Outlook if you create signatures with typical responses, you just right-click on your signature and choose the alternative signature with the relevant response.

You can create signatures that write things like…..

“FYI”

“Thank you for your interest in the position.  We’ll update you if you’re a good match.”

“Great meeting you!  I’ll send you the proposal shortly.”

If you find yourself typing the same responses to emails, just create a signature that includes the response, so you never have to type it again.

10. Don’t Read Every Email as Soon as It Arrives

I’m not a fan of text messaging.  (Yes, I’m the only one.)

I like the brevity, but text messaging implies, “Stop everything and give me your attention now!”

A similar expectation has occurred with emails.  When a new email arrives we jump to read it.  And, then we respond or return to whatever task we were working on, so our attention is divided all day, every day.  However, studies show that it’s better to focus on one task until completion.

I read of one company that created a policy that required employees to disable email notifications, so the staff wouldn’t be distracted every time an email arrived.

You’ll get more done in less time if you take a similar approach.

11. Bonus….How to Prevent Accidentally Sending Embarrassing Emails!

No email needs to be immediately sent.

Click the link below to learn how to configure a two-minute delay….

How to Prevent Accidentally Sending Embarrassing Emails!

 

There you have it.

Follow all these recommendations and soon you’ll be experience the wonderfully unsettling feeling of “Where are all the emails?”

Exactly.

Please report back on how well these recommendations work for you.

Do you have any suggestions not included in this article?  If so, please add them to the comments.

 

Interested in professional I.T. support for your office?

Visit my office technology support firm, avenue X group, at www.aXg.com.