For a professional, it’s impossible to think of a day without emails. Studies show that corporate professionals spend about a third of their office hours checking their inboxes.
By prioritizing email, you end up sacrificing your productivity, focus, and creativity. The following tips can help you keep your inbox check time under control.
1. Limit Checking Emails
Checking your inbox an infinite number of times will take you nowhere. Therefore, limit the number of times you want to check new emails in your inbox.
Create the limit depending on your requirement and workload. Checking email at the beginning and end of the working hours is fine. If necessary, you can also check it once post-lunch.
Don’t check your inbox during the most productive hours of the day, like morning and evening, or when you spend time with your family. You can be flexible and continue experimenting until you find something suitable. For example, you can set limits like:
- Do not check business email before 10 a.m. and after 7 p.m. or during weekends.
- Check your inbox only twice or thrice a day.
- Use any structured system that shows only recent or important emails.
2. Get Tasks Directly to Task Management App
Are you one of them who depends on emails for task assignments? If yes, it is time to change. One of the top reasons for constantly checking inboxes is that others assign you new tasks through emails or keep your tasks there.
Your email inbox doesn’t have to work as your to-do list. Restrict the email usage only to communication purposes, move anything that needs action beyond a response to task management apps or to-do list applications. Such applications also offer instant communication features that will make the project management seamless.
3. Immediately Act on the Emails
If you open an email and read it, don’t just close it after reading and get busy with other emails. Act on that email immediately to avoid coming back to your inbox again to respond.
If the email needs a reply, do that. If you need the email for future reference:
- Keep it.
- If the email is business-critical, star it.
- If you don’t need it anymore, delete it.
Getting done with each email you read is the key to keep your inbox and brain free from clutter.
4. Close Your Email Client
Yes, you can continue working on your desktop without keeping the email app up and running. After checking and responding to your emails, close the app and focus on completing your tasks.
Inform your family, friends, colleagues, and clients that email is not the best way to reach you for an immediate response.
Once they are aware of it, they’ll have limited expectations from you regarding email response. You can use various other instant messaging applications on your phone or laptop to stay in touch with your family and colleagues.
5. Keep Email Replies Short
If you have the habit of writing long emails, stop wasting your time and switch to writing short email messages. Make sure your emails are to the point, and your query is stated in the very first line to avoid any confusion. You can finish most emails in a few sentences, and its brevity suggests that you value everyone’s time, including your own.
Only a few emails will need a longer response, and you can easily keep them in the “respond later” category. If possible, you can send such replies in the form of audio messages.
6. Say No to Email Notifications
Notifications are the major cause of distraction for a modern-day professional. It would be wrong to presume that all the notifications come from social media.
Email alerts also appear occasionally, causing your regular workflow to be disrupted. With email notification enabled, closing the app or tab will not be of any help.
If you are distracted by every new email notification and get busy checking your email inbox, it is better to disable the new email notification. It’ll help you focus on the task at hand, especially the ones that need complete attention.
7. Try Activating Weekend Autoresponder
This method is essential if you’re a freelancer or a solopreneur. Autoresponder saves you from being alienated from everyone while ignoring the emails for your peace of mind.
Create some thoughtful and informative autoresponders that can take care of all the emails you get during weekends or vacations.
8. Stop Checking Email on Your Smartphone
This point might scare you with FOMO. However, think twice whether you really need an email client installed on your phone or not. Instead of getting emails, you can use more instant communication apps such as Slack on your phone. Let’s leave the email for your desktop and enjoy your short break without any worries.
9. Value Your Inbox Space
You might be using a free email client, but that does not mean you’ll let your inbox clutter with unwanted emails. If you subscribed to websites that bombard you throughout the day with sales and promotional deals, it is time to take some action.
Many promotional emails land on your emails because you gave them permission in the first place. So, unsubscribe from the websites that you’re not interested in anymore.
Also, think twice before signing up for the newsletters next time. With that, you do not have to spend time finding the important emails or deleting unnecessary emails.
10. Separate Your Personal and Business Email Accounts
It might look like something all of us know, but there’ll always be some people who receive both professional and personal emails in the same inbox. If you’re one of them, it is high time you created different emails for personal and professional purposes.
Try not to check your personal email during office hours (unless you’re expecting some crucial email to arrive). Likewise, avoid checking official email outside office hours. Thus, you can maintain a healthy work-life balance which will ultimately contribute to your productivity.
Work Productively Without Hampering Your Inbox
Even though email has brought a revolutionary change in how we communicate, paying too much attention to it can be both distracting and destructive. By limiting your attention to your inbox, you can continue to focus on day-to-day tasks.