Well, this won’t be a sexy blog post but it will be a helpful one – we’ve got a list of our top Email Productivity Hacks!
“You got mail” used to be an exciting notification but now it can cause stress and anxiety. Let’s face it, we spend endless hours checking and responding to emails sometimes.
Most of us have felt the overwhelming anxiety of watching emails pile up after a busy day. We have been there, felt the pain, and we want to provide some email productivity tricks and hacks to help reduce the time dedicated to emailing.
We hope these tips help reduce stress and if you need additional tips to reduce burnout, check out our post on after work routines to reduce burnout!
Getting Organized: The First Tip in Managing Your Inbox
One of the key factors in owning your inbox and practicing good email hygiene is organizing your inbox and emails to your liking. If you use Gmail, Outlook, or another email provider, you can implement a few key organization practices to get you started on the right foot.
Before you start organizing your inbox, ask yourself – how do I like to work? There are many organization gurus out there but at the end of the day, not all techniques work for everyone. Are you a one folder person, a category, function, or no folder emailer? To ensure that you’re able to implement many of these hacks, first identify how you want your email organized.
Pro-tip: You can create folders per sender, subject, organization, or any other attributes. We suggest that you identify your folder style before implementing these new techniques.
11 Email Productivity Hacks that will Save you Time and Reduce Stress
1. Clean up your inbox by unsubscribing to emails: The first tip in managing your inbox is reducing how many emails you receive. Subscription emails can flood your inbox and create distractions. By creating noise in your inbox, it may become hard to handle the emails that require your immediate attention. One of our favorite tools is unroll.me. By using unroll.me, you can mass unsubscribe from email senders.
2. Reduce notifications: Turn them off completely or set up email notifications for a select group of senders. You may want to see notifications from your manager, a school teacher, or a client. Turning off notifications will help reduce distractions. Often an email will come in and we will immediately stop doing what we are doing. Now, if you do go with the no notification strategy, you may ask – won’t I miss emails? Keep reading below.
3. Time block/schedule email time: If you are reactive to emails, you may not be able to provide an optimal response and or you may get completely distracted. By scheduling email time during the day, you can devote your un-divided attention to answering emails. This is widely dependent on your schedule but if you do not have pressing deadlines, it will save you stress!
4. Use Templates, Signatures, or Text Snippets/Text Expanders: These are a lifesaver! If you are emailing many people with the same messaging, try to use a template, signature, or snippets. Some of the best text expanders will allow you to add text, images and multi-media. As for signatures, you can create specific signatures in Outlook that are email responses and for templates, we have a Gmail link for creating templates. Our favorite tool for text snippets/expansion is Textexpander.
Other Hacks That You’ll Totally Love
5. Do not check email immediately in the morning: Check your email when you log into work. This may seem counterintuitive but we suggest that you do not start out the morning stressed. Reserving time in the morning to take care of yourself (meditate, workout) will allow you to be in a great mental mindset when you start to tackle emails.
6. Don’t let emails linger: Try to make a decision on the email when you open it – what is the immediate action you can take? You can answer immediately or put it in a folder if you do not need to respond. Taking swift action and deciding on emails will allow you to make it through your email quickly and efficiently.
7. Avoid multi-task while emailing: Multi-tasking used to be the indicator of someone who is super human but in recent studies, multi-tasking is not effective. Multi-tasking can reduce productivity, impair brain functioning, and cause you to make excessive mistakes.
8. Close your email when you aren’t emailing: If you have your email up in the background of your computer, this can be very distracting. Close your email and only open it during your scheduled email blocks.
9. Schedule emails ahead: If you need to send an email to someone but it’s late or early, opt into scheduling emails. Instead of waiting on a better time to go back into your email and send it, schedule the email for an appropriate time.
10. Use tools to maximize your time: If you spend a majority of your time scheduling, try out calendly. If you need some help with your writing, check out grammarly, and if you’d like to pause your inbox, try Boomerang. Outsource where you can!
11. Set Boundaries: Learn how to say no to requests, and ask to be removed from threads/emails at work that are no longer necessary. Do not hesitate to ask to be removed or moved to bcc!
The Scary Truth About Checking Emails Too Frequently
We hope you’ve loved our list of email productivity hacks!
We found this super helpful calculator to help you calculate how many hours you may spend distracted if you react to all your emails when they arrive.
If you start working at 21, retire at 67, and get distracted by 5 different emails, you may spend over 22,041.7 hours distracted by email disruptions!
Hopefully these tips will help to increase your productivity and reduce the amount of time spent emailing. If you like these tips, let us know. If you have any other tips, we’d love to hear them as well!
Let us know what email productivity hacks you love!!
XX,
T&W