Time Management Tips for Using Email
Electronic mail appeared as a blessing. It would let you communicate with friends, family and co-workers in a matter of seconds, regardless of where they were around the world.
With such a fantastic communication tool, however, other problems emerged. Just ask any manager of a big corporation and he will tell you that 40% or more of his work day is dedicated to receiving and sending emails.
That is a big time drain. How could you manage your emails more efficiently, reducing the overall time consumed in the process? I have been asking this question to myself for a long time, and below you will find two tips that worked pretty well.
1. Respond right after reading each email
I used to read all the emails in a row. Afterwards I would re-read the important ones and only then respond. Sometimes a couple of hours would pass before I returned to the important emails, and it was not rare that some of them would get lost or forgotten.
As you can see the process was very inefficient. First of all because I would waste time reading each email two or more times. Secondly because there was a risk of neglecting emails altogether.
The solution for this problem was simple: respond to each email right after reading it. The only exception was emails that did not require an answer at all.
Read, reply, next. It works like a charm.
2. Bulk check
Another bad habit that I had was to check the email client every time that a new message arrived. A much better approach is to bulk check your emails. Ideally you want to fix two or three times along the day where you will sit, read and reply to emails.
Outside these time brackets you should not touch the email client.
This post was written as part of the Time Management group writing project hosted by InspirationBit.
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I think you have some good views. The issue I have though is that bulk whilst in principal is great - a lot of people nowadays rely on e-mail and use it to communicate important issues, rather than speaking either face to face or over the phone.
As such, fixing two or three points in the day could actually mean important issues are mixed. Yes it may teach people a preferred way of working, however, it could cause big issues in the interim.
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Bulk check works great for me. I told my clients I would be checking email only 3 times a day and that they should call if whatever it was could not wait.
then i put an autoresponder on my email for two weeks saying the same thing, and voila! unnecessary emails down 60%, phone calls up 100%.
Try it!
Your first point is a very helpful and important one. Something that I noticed myself needing to address. I’ll try replying to each email right away, but sometimes I just have no time, and postpone it for awhile. Especially if I bulk check them - there are just too many to reply.
I agree with Rich that bulk checking emails doesn’t always work, often I rely on the emails to get the answers to my questions, or simply getting more work from those emails.
And I wouldn’t want to increase my phone calls volume.
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[…] Time Management Tips for Using Email 简介： 本文的作者是Daniel Scocco，尽管每天要写很多的blog，回复所有的评论和邮件，看看他是怎么做的吧！ […]
[…] Time Management Tips for Using Email 简介： 本文的作者是Daniel Scocco，尽管每天要写很多的blog，回复所有的评论和邮件，看看他是怎么做的吧！ […]
[…] Time Management Tips for Using Email简介： 本文的作者是Daniel Scocco，尽管每天要写很多的blog，回复所有的评论和邮件，看看他是怎么做的吧！ […]
A great tool for managing your many email accounts is a new startup called www.NutshellMail.com. NutshellMail enables you to access and manage messages from all you email and social networking sites through any inbox you already use. It works by sending you a snapshot of all messages sent to your various accounts. You determine when you receive your email updates. So if you are trying to limit when you check your personal mail at work; simply set the delivery time for the hour in the day you want to check your mail. From the emailed update, you can click links to be automatically signed into your account providers’ webmail inboxes or you can access all messages through an integrated mailbox hosted by NutshellMail. The site is still underdevelopment, but you can submit your email address to be one of the first users.
www.NutshellMail.com