Do you know that moment when you’re just about to look at your email for the first time in the morning? While your computer fires up or your PDA pulls up the messages, what goes through your head? If you’re like most people, you are preparing to scan everything new and give your attention to the most important messages. That’s a good place to start.

But what about those other messages? After you’ve attended to the critical stuff, do you have a routine for deleting the junk, then filing (or ignoring) lower priority messages? It’s good to get all this riff-raff out of your Inbox, but wouldn’t it be nice if most of it never hit your Inbox in the first place?

If you added up all the seconds you’re spending reading subject lines – only to discover the message isn’t important right now – you’d discover a nice chunk of time you could be using each day for higher value activities. Here are a few tricks to help you trade up your subject-line-scanning time:

Folder Rules and Smart Mailboxes

Use Folder Rules in the Outlook Options menu, Smart Mailboxes for Mac or gmail tags to automatically divert lower priority messages or those you want to batch for consolidated review later.

Examples:

• Friend requests for social networking sites
• Useful newsletters you’d like to read sometime
• Catalogue order confirmations
• Monthly billing notifications

RSS
Feeds

Check whether some of your favourite online content sites like blogs and newsletters offer an RSS Feed option. Set up a feed reader such as Feed Demon, subscribe to the Feeds you like, and unsubscribe from the email lists.

Create Separate Personal and Work Addresses

Set yourself up to receive and send multiple email addresses in/out of the same application (e.g. your gmail addresses are run through Outlook or Entourage), then create Rules that collect all mail sent to your personal address in one folder, work emails to another, etc. This is like creating separate Inboxes, which allows you to concentrate on different roles at different times of the day.

Use a Good Spam Filter

Talk with your tech department to get a spam filter up and running. If you have one but are still receiving a good deal of junk, fiddle with the sensitivity levels until you are happy with the filtering. If you don’t have a tech department, contact us for recommendations and help with this.

Discover the Junk
Mail Rule

When you wind up on somebody’s mailing list but don’t want to receive their news, you can block further communication by marking it as Junk Mail. This is especially useful when dealing with possible phishing messages which use the ‘click here to unsubscribe’ link as a sneaky way to confirm that your email address is a real one.

Wait and See…

The less email you send, the less you will receive. For more on this, see The Hamster Revolution. Allow some ‘urgent’ emails, Reply-to-All conversations and messages representing incomplete thinking some time to simmer before contributing. Per Cicero: “Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.”

Team Communications
Charter

In corporate settings a good 60% of the email someone receives come from the same 8 senders. If this is true for your workgroup, it’s worth taking some time to get everybody on the same page as to how, when and why email is to be used. For a proven training solution, read about the Info-Excellence Seminar.

Need help with some of the tech set-up? Please get in touch with us.

Filed under: Email