Hate Email? Three Hacks to Tame the Inbox for Good!

According to studies, the average worker sends 40 emails per day and receives 90.  To put this in perspective, if your company has 1000 employees, the team will send out 40,000 business emails in just one day!

Your email box can be a time vampire, but there are tricks to taming the monster.  Here are three hacks you can use to make email work for you instead of the other way around.

Templating via signature

Do you find yourself writing similar emails all the time?  From accepting meetings to responding to requests for information on the due diligence process, you probably write similar email responses multiple times each day.  To make this process more efficient, draft templates for the emails you write all the time. 

To take this to the next level, use the “signature” function in your email system.  Draft a new signature and title it, “respond to due diligence request.”  When you get an email about due diligence requests, begin by adding your “due diligence signature,” which will populate your response with your template.  You can then simply edit from your template, making your response time faster, and you more efficient.

30-days until delete

Do you have messages you haven’t read or responded to in months?  If so, get rid of them.  Let’s face it – if you haven’t responded to a message within 30 days, you’re probably not going to.  In fact, it may be more embarrassing to write, “Sorry I haven’t responded in two months…” than to just delete the message. 

Whatever the issue or question was, it’s unlikely to remain relevant now.  If the issue were important, it would likely be followed-up upon.  Do yourself a favor and delete anything you haven’t read or responded to in the last 30 days. 

Unsubscribe and Junk the Junk 

Whenever you find yourself added to an email list you don’t want to be on, instead of just deleting, take the time to unsubscribe.  If you’ve outgrown a marketing email, or simply don’t find the content useful, unsubscribe or assign the sender to your junk file.  If you skip this step and delete the email each time, you’ll be stealing time from yourself week after week.

As Clay Shirky said, “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.”  By taming the email beast, you’ll have more time to do the important work.