Email, hate it or love it it’s become an essential part of our working lives. It’s a fact of our lives that it’s hard to get work done without using it. Unfortunately, despite it’s work usage, email is one of the biggest time wasters out there, and rife with distractions. Many small business owners (as well as pretty much everyone else) find themselves spending too much time sorting, reading, and responding to emails. Today, we’ll look at 8 tips to mastering your inbox, and how busy entrepreneurs can claim back valuable time each day.
Set Up Your Email Time
Probably the most popular tip is to set up dedicated time where you sort through your email. Personally, I like to look over my emails during my morning coffee, and then again at lunch; but different times work for different people.
The key here is that all too often email becomes a distraction. It’s super easy to get taken out of the flow of your work to check and email, and then struggle to get back into work. By setting up dedicated email times, you avoid the constant distraction it poses.
Another key thing to this is that your email checking becomes a routine. If you tackle a little bit everyday you’ll be much more likely to stick with it than letting it build up. This is key to staying motivated and keeping with it.
Take Action Immediately
Another quick tip is to take action immediately on all the emails you get. Nothing screams wasted of time like opening the same email 4-5 times because you didn’t take action on it earlier.
Once you open an email, always look to take the appropriate action on them right away. Do this during your dedicated time as mentioned above, and don’t let your emails build up.
Use Your Email Software Effectively
No matter what software you use for your email there’s likely to be a lot of time saving functionality built in. Things like folders, sorting, and more are usually standard with every email client from Outlook to Gmail. Fully utilizing this functionality can save you a lot of time.
Gmail for example has the ability to smartly sort emails based on categories. I can set up folders to specifically hold things like social media alerts or newsletters so that they don’t clog up my main email view. This can help cut down on the noise when sorting through your email each day.
The above is just one example, each software is a little bit different in how it does things. For those looking to truly master their inbox, spend some time learning about the time saving features your software has built in. You might be surprised how much time you save each day!
Labels and Folders
Building off the last point, utilize labels and folders to help keep on track. This is especially important for emails which you might not be able to get to right away. Instead of letting them clog up your email move them to a folder that you can get to later.
You can even extend this to creating folders for different projects, events, or whatever else makes sense. This can help keep your default inbox clean, while still keeping track of all the important emails you’ve received.
It’s important here to realize that there is no one size fits all solution. You want to do what makes sense to you, and what works for your unique workflow.
Tone Down The Alerts
Another powerful thing you can do to actually wean yourself off checking your email as much is to tone down or remove the number of alerts you get. I don’t know about you, but if my phone goes off with an alert it’s difficult for me not to check it. I turn off alerts on my phone, and also limit them on my desktop.
This is a quick tip, but certainly helps me stay focused during the day.
Do an Email Purge
If you’re anything like me, you probably have a ton of old newsletters you’ve subscribed to that you don’t care about. Maybe you got some PDF or free download when you gave them your email, but whatever the case is you no longer care about the access.
In this case, I like to go through and do an email purge. Every one in a while I’ll take a look at the emails I’ve been getting, and honestly ask myself if I still need to be getting emails from this source. If not, then I unsubscribe.
This is a great way to get your inbox under control and keep things simple. The less emails you get the better, and the less time you’ll have to spend time going through them. If you let your email get too big it’s going to be much more difficult to want to get through all them each day.
Prepare Canned Responses
If you find yourself getting the same types of emails each preparing canned responses is a great way to save some time. These are simple email templates that you can fire off when you get an email of a specific type, and save you time actually writing it.
This is a situational tip that obviously won’t work for all emails, but when it does it’s a huge time saver. If you get the same email 2-3 times a day imagine how much time you use writing a response to each one. With a canned response you only write it once, and lightly tweak as needed. Many email software also offer the ability to save your response right there in the program so you can quickly and easily choose to use it when appropriate.
Use Multiple Email Accounts
Lastly, something I do is utilize multiple email accounts. I have one that I use only for business, and another that I have for personal matters.
Any sort of newsletter or other stuff I send to my personal account, which helps me keep my work email small. This helps keep me focused during working hours as I only have to worry about what’s in that single email. Since all my newsletters, social media, and other personal matters are set to send to my personal email my work email stays very small. I’m very easily distracted, so the less opportunities to fall into any of them the better.
Mastering Your Inbox
Hopefully these tips help you cut down the time you spend on email each day. Even if it just saves you a few minutes that time adds up over the weeks and months.
For more email and productivity tips aimed at small business owners check out our new book: “It’s Your Time: Time Management For Small Businesses and The Art Of Getting More Done”.