Email Management: How to Stay on Top of Your Inbox

Did you know the average professional spends four hours each day answering work emails? If you want to learn email management tips, we can help.

In this guide, we’ll go over how to manage your email.

Want to learn more? Keep reading.

Go Through Your Email Daily

You might check your inbox a few times a day. Checking your email and processing your emails are two different things. Give yourself time during the day to process emails.

Make sure you focus on the more important ones first. If you don’t finish them, you can continue working on them the next day.

Do you work in a position where you get a lot of time-sensitive emails? Don’t procrastinate and avoid your emails. Give yourself time to go through the important ones.

Don’t Respond to Every Message

You don’t have to respond to every email that enters your inbox. If you get a high volume, you could spend your entire workday responding to emails.

You’ll feel drained at the end of the day and get behind on your work tasks.

It’s more effective to use your time on high-value tasks. Don’t stress about responding to all the messages. If the costs don’t outweigh the benefits, don’t worry about replying.

Delete Promotional and Junk Email Right Away

When you open your inbox, you’ll want to scan the contents to see what you can delete right away. Check the sender and subject line. Is the email junk or a promotional message you won’t read?

The messages you identify as not vital need to get selected and moved to the trash. If you aren’t in a rush, consider identifying regular senders and unsubscribe from them.

Why is this step necessary? When you delete irrelevant messages, you can scan the remaining messages fast. You’ll be able to decide which ones are the important ones.

Use Another Email Address

Set up a different email account for emails from your bank. Send marketing emails or shipping notices to this email as well.

Otherwise, your inbox will get cluttered fast. It will be more difficult to find important emails. Using a different email address will keep these emails separate from important emails.

If your email address gets added to a distribution list, messages won’t clutter your main inbox.

Write Short and Concise Emails

When you write emails, make sure you pen concise and clear messages. Writing a short message will help people understand your point right away.

Give yourself one minute to respond to the email and then archive it. This way, you won’t let the email sit in your inbox for a long time. You won’t worry about it while working on other tasks.

Keep to the one minute rule when replying, so you don’t spend more time than necessary on it.

Depending on the recipient, you might need to craft a longer message. Sometimes you will need to provide a lot of details. In general, aim to write in a concise and clear manner.

This way, there won’t be a lot of back and forth between you and the sender. If you worry you sound too frank in the email, add exclamations or emojis.

Use Distribution Lists or Groups

Do you send frequent messages to the same group of people? Consider setting up an email alias or group. In Outlook, you need to look for the distribution list.

In Gmail, head to contacts and add people in a group. Give your group a name. When you type that name, your message will get sent to everyone in that group.

Using groups will save time because you won’t need to type every person’s name out.

Create Canned Responses

Are there messages that you need to send often? You don’t have to write it from scratch every time, so reuse what you’ve written before. Make a canned response.

This way, you can reply to messages fast without overthinking.

Delete Messages

Data limits can occur even with organized people. Free up some space by deleting messages. You don’t need to delete messages in bulk every day but complete this task once a week.

Sort your sent mail by attachment or file size. Get rid of the biggest ones you don’t need.

Next, you can sort emails by subject line. Look for messages that you send every week and delete them all at once.

Sort the messages by the recipient. Do you have friends, groups, or colleagues you email often? If the emails sent between you aren’t important, you can select many emails and delete them all at once.

Give Yourself a Time Limit

Make sure you give yourself a limit on how much time you spend checking your emails.

See how long it takes to read, reply, and sort through your inbox. Could you have used that time on a different work task?

You may get emails that are super long. Scan through the email and if it’s relevant, process it right away. Use the one minute rule. If you don’t plan to reply, archive the email.

Log into your inbox and finish reading or replying to messages. Head out right away, so you don’t waste time.

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Now You Know More About Email Management

We hope this guide on email management was helpful. Consider sorting and organizing your email at least once a week. Send emails to folders, and delete marketing or promotional emails right away.

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