Seven Tips for Managing Email Overload
We have a love-hate relationship with email. It has been an immensely valuable business communication tool for five decades, but it is also the source of infuriating amounts of spam and productivity-zapping workday interruptions. It is estimated that the typical office worker sends and receives more than 150 emails per day, has thousands of items in his or her inbox and spends roughly 25 percent of the workweek reading, writing, deleting, sorting, searching, and sending emails.
Productivity pros say the following management tips can help you reduce stress and minimize the amount of time you spend dealing with the constant barrage of email:
Do not leave the email client open. Only check email periodically throughout the day. This will relieve you from a steady stream of notifications and alerts that interrupt your workflow.
Do not use the inbox as a “to-do” list of tasks, actions or appointments that must be dealt with in the future. Instead, delete or respond to messages as soon as possible.
Get organized with folders and flags. Sort, group, or flag messages that need to be saved for future reference or require additional research and review.
Create rule-based filters to send incoming messages to an appropriate folder or to the trash.
Immediately respond to any new messages that can be answered in two minutes or less. Anything requiring more than two minutes should be moved into a separate “requires response” folder. Set aside time each day to respond to everything in this folder.
Unsubscribe to mailing lists that generate regular junk mail. Free tools such as Unroll.Me and SaneBox allow you to unsubscribe to emails either individually or in bulk.
Disable social media notifications. This can eliminate hundreds of emails each month.