More often than not we are over flowing with emails – most of which is junk or items that honestly could go days or weeks without a reply and not matter. Other emails more important often get lost in the haystack – whats more once they are buried we may never find them again or if we do its often too late.
So many a productivity guru such as Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame and plenty others practise a ritual of emptying the inbox of your email, categorizing them and thus enabling a clear inbox, clear mind and maintaining said inbox should allow you to manage your email and work more efficiently.
A great article recently about achieving inbox zero over at Web Worker Daily explaining how during the first pass through you must archive or delete as much as possible to achieve inbox zero followed by setting up “must read and must respond” folders to archive incoming emails, filtering and labelling emails, turning off notifications and processing in chunks to get things cleared up – some of these tips are useful.
- If you seriously do not need that email from Lads Mag weekly or Gardeners Delight – unsubscribe. If that takes too much effort – install the Unsubscribe for Gmail service – one click and it will unsubscribe you from multiple email time wasters all at once [Unsubscribe.com]
- Batch your email – you do NOT need to be alerted every 2 – 3 minutes when a new email comes in, you do not need to CHECK your email every couple minutes to see if a new email has arrived. Do you seriously go look at the letter box every few minutes to see if a new piece of mail has arrived at your front door? Batch your email and only check and reply at certain times of the day.
- You should not be looking at ALL your mail, if you have Gmail or Google Mail for businesses then make sure you turn on Priority inbox – let the little Google robots determine for you what is important and what is not. After a bit of training you will be able to just focus on the important stuff and not the mail that can wait until later. [Priority Inbox]
- Just because you remember at 11:45pm that you need to get that email to Joe for first thing in the morning doesn’t mean you have to send it right away because by 9am its probably lost under a huge pile of other email waiting for Joe to go through. Instead why not write it, send it at a scheduled time? Use Boomerang for Gmail which allows you to do JUST that…write emails, schedule to send later OR EVEN be sent back to you at a later date if you do not have the mental capacity for it right now! [Boomerang for Gmail]
- Now just because its number 5 doesn’t mean its the least powerful in fact its the most powerful in my opinion but I feel you must have all the above four covered first off. AWAYFIND I don’t think I can give this service justice with my own words… Go get an account, register your Gmail account with them and then setup filters, even if its basic filtering that allows you to be in peace for a while. What Awayfind does is monitor your email and your calendar and then send you alerts to your iPhone or Email (alternate email is best) as to when an important email hits your actual inbox. So maybe your meeting with Joe for coffee tomorrow, but 3 hours before you are due to meet he drops you an email saying he cannot make it – well you had him scheduled on your calendar (right?) Awayfind will notice that and his email will be alerted to you with a high priority message on your phone. Use Away find as your primary inbox so that you can work without the constant interruptions of emails, be alerted when important content comes in as defined by your rules/filters and never miss an important email again. Cannot stress enough the productive increase I and many others have had from using this tool. [AwayFind]
