Here are 8 Tips to Get Your Email (and inbox) under Control
If you’re like most people these days, you probably get between 50 and 250 email messages a day (or 400+ like me), many of which are unwanted. Although some of those emails are important, many of them are not. They are unsolicited, unwanted spam type messages. Multiply that by the number of email accounts you have, and you could find yourself spending the better part of most days just deleting and/or responding to these electronic communications. The problem is how to clear out your inbox and better manage your time.
Here are eight tips Women in Ecommerce™ recommends to get your email under control.
1. The Goal is to keep your inbox EMPTY. This is the key to managing you e-mail.
2. Put important email messages in a folder or folders and title the folders appropriately.
3. Answer important emails in a timely fashion at specified times of the day (you decide when it is appropriate to respond and schedule that as your email writing time.
4. Set your inbox to check for new messages only a few times a day. Turn down the “you’ve got mail” announcer so you can better focus on the job at hand.
5. Use a spam filter. Many email programs already come with them as part of the package. You may risk losing some email messages, however, you have greater control over what you allow into your inbox. And you can always check your junk box to find emails you might want. Then take those email addresses and “whitelist” them so they don’t end up in your junk folder in the future.
6. Put important email addresses in your address book so you won’t have to go searching for them when you need to send a message in a hurry.
7. Subscribe to mailing lists, listservs and the like at a different e-mail address than the one you use for business. This will help with email overload and you can check these in your spare time instead of having to peruse them with your more urgent communications. Gmail may be a good choice for this.
8. Use your “delete” key. Clean up your inbox and remove old, unused messages.
Let us know how you keep your email under control!
By the way, if you are in South Florida May 26th, be sure and visit us when we present: Content Is Queen… How to Leverage your Website/Blog Content . We’d love to see you there!
