Answering your questions about business and technology
Question
What can I do to better manage my email? I have too much spam, and I miss important messages
~ William
Answer
Hi William,
Thanks for the question.
Email management has become more challenging in recent years because of so many things (i.e., subscriptions, unsolicited messages, etc.) Here are several options for you to try to get it under control -
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- Have scheduled times for email each day (i.e., once every two hours for no more than 15 minutes)
- You can use an email management tool that actually locks you out of your email if it is outside of your scheduled times
- Unsubscribe ruthlessly from subscriptions, newsletters, etc., that you no longer get value from
- Alternatively, you can set up a separate email address for these things so that they don’t interfere with your important messages
- Create templates for outgoing messages to save time
- Update your social media profiles to reduce cold reachouts
- Change your title to something non-standard so that your profile is not included when sites are scanned
- Delegate control of your mailbox to an assistant
- Let them know which messages are essential and to only send those to you
- Implement an Inbox zero policy
- Delete unnecessary messages
- Delegate messages that can be handled by someone else
- Respond immediately if it will take less than two minutes
- Defer non-priority messages
- Do priority tasks
I don’t recommend doing all of these at the same time. Try one and see if anything improves. Then try another.
Hope this helps,
Damien