5 Ways to Tame Your Email
Beast
These five methods and applications can get the email monkey
off your back.
Email is a HUGE waste of time. It's
not just SPAM (which is bad enough), it's your email-happy coworkers,
employees, and customers.
According to one internal study, "the average employee spends 40 percent of their working week
dealing with internal emails which add no value to the business." Consider
that figure. If it's anywhere close to valid, you're wasting up to two days
of every workweek futzing with your email.
Not to worry. Here are five
relatively easy and painless ways to get the email monkey off your back... so
you can get some real work done.
1.
Tune the settings on your email app.
Let's start with the basics. Every
email client has built-in capabilities that, when used properly, can lighten
your email load.
Outlook, for example, can apply
"rules" to incoming emails, sorting them into folders for future
viewing, prioritizing them based upon sender, or deleting them altogether. The
interface for building such rules is a bit wonky, but it's definitely worth the
effort to master.
Similarly, Gmail can sort your emails based upon whom you
correspond with the most. Even the relatively lame built-in iPhone mail
client provides rudimentary SPAM filtering. Spend a little time
tuning what you've got and you can save a lot of time later.
2.
Learn more about your senders.
Now we're going to get a little more
fancy. It's easier to figure out which emails need attention if you know more
about who sent them to you. One way is to pop out of email and search the web
but that's a hassle.
What works much better is a program
that trolls around the web for you and fills you in on whomever sent you the
email. Applications that do this vary according to the email client.
For example, Gmail users can use an application like Rapportive while Outlook users can use applications
like LinkedIn for Outlook. A word of warning: be
selective in customizing Outlook because the base program is not all that
stable to begin with.
3.
Use your smartphone as a filter.
Most people hook up their smartphone
to their email account and end up reading (and thinking about) the incoming
stream of email twice. That pretty much guarantees that you'll end up wasting
time.
A more sane approach is to use an
application like AwayFind. It spins through your incoming emails and when you receive an
email from somebody important, sends you a text.
4.
Automatically update your contacts.
Another big time consumer with email
is "processing" contact information from the important emails that
you receive, like those from your customers. It's all too easy to waste two or
three minutes cutting and pasting stuff into your contact manager.
Honestly, there's no reason why you
should be hassling with such mind-numbingly boring clerical work. Depending on
what client you're using, there are multiple applications that harvest that
data for you.
I recall seeing a number of these
that work with CRM systems, but recently a colleague of mine recommended WriteThatName, which works with Gmail, GoogleApps,
Outlook, and Lotus Notes.
5. Outsource your mailbox management.
Finally, there's the gold standard
of keeping your email out of your hair, which is letting somebody else futz
with it for you. I know one small company CEO who has his wife sort his
messages, leaving him to focus on his customers and suppliers.
Another approach is to hand the
email management to an omnibus program, like Sanebox, which adds some layers of intelligence atop the barebones
features of whatever email system you're using.
Regardless of what approach you end
up using, figure on spending half a day setting up an environment that makes
your email less of a time burden. Your goal should be to reduce the time you
spend on email, not increase the time you spend customizing it.
http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/5-ways-to-tame-your-email-beast.html?cid=em01019week08e
No comments:
Post a Comment