Our first guest post!

Email is such an important part of our daily work lives that we might not even notice how much of our valuable time it actually eats up. In today’s article, you’ll learn how to squeeze much of the waste from your email management habits. By the time we’re done you’ll be able to free up more of your time, making your work more profitable, efficient and stress-free.

Work in batches and stop checking your email:

This is the most painful part, so we’ll get it out of the way first.

Once you get thrown off of your train of thought, it can take 10 or 15 minutes to regain your momentum again. The best way to eliminate interruptions and preserve this workflow is to handle all of your emails in large batches instead of one-by-one.

Remember. This is your email. You own it, and it doesn’t own you.

You’ll never get an email so important that you can’t answer it later. You have the power to decide when these tasks get done.

In fact, you should only be checking your emails no more than 2 or 3 times per day. Otherwise, you’re just creating unnecessary distractions for yourself.

Another benefit of batch processing is that you’ll find it very boring after a while. And this boredom will push you to write shorter, more concise emails that save you time and express your ideas more clearly.

Next, you’ll want to turn off the automatic checking and notification features in your email clients. Popup email notifications provide very little value, and only cause unnecessary distractions.

If you find that you have a hard time breaking the habit of constantly checking your emails, try deleting the desktop icon for MS Outlook. This will force you to spend an extra 30 seconds digging through the Start menu to launch your email application.

I know some of you might be cringing a while reading this, but you’ll thank me later. This step alone will save you several hours per week of wasted effort.

Sort your mail immediately using folders:

With physical paper mail, sorting is a necessity. You can’t have your bills and personal letters mixed in with your junk mail. It would take too long to find the right letter when you need it, and you’d end up missing important deadlines or losing vital documents.

Your email is no different. As soon as an email comes in, you must immediately decide whether to:

• Delete it
• Complete the task right away
• Save it away for later

After that, you should only keep about 10% of your emails. And these should all be sorted out into folders by functional group. Nothing should remain in your Inbox.

Communicate more efficiently:

By now you’ve learned how to process email in batch, and organize your workflow more effectively. Another place to squeeze out those out those last few precious minutes would be in the way you communicate via email.

Although long emails might artificially make you feel like you’re getting more work done, short emails are easier to interpret, and will lead to fewer crossed wires and misunderstandings.

And if you’re dealing with a customer in a sales situation, the shorter emails are also more likely to get read.

• Get right to the point, and keep the small talk to a minimum.
• Each topic should take up no more than a paragraph.
• If you have many different subjects to discuss, split the discussion into multiple emails as a means of keeping the conversations focused. Otherwise, one of your ideas will be given priority and the others will be neglected.
• If your email is more than 15 lines long, just pick up the phone and call the recipient instead.

A final legal warning about your business email

This is a topic that isn’t covered enough in time management articles. But it’s of growing importance for business owners.

Thanks to a slew of new laws, (SOX404, HIPAA, PIPEDA, etc…) the courts are increasingly treating corporate emails as official business documents. In the eyes of the courts, a joke that you sent to your friend might be just as official as any invoice or RFP.

For this reason, it’s important that you keep an archival backup of every email that passes through your system for several years. (Depending on which laws apply to your industry)

As your company grows in size, so will the complexity of your email storage. That’s why, once you reach the 10-15 employee mark, you may want to look into automated ways of setting and enforcing policies for the classification and retention of your business email. This will greatly simplify the search process in the event that your company is subject to a legal discovery request.

By taking a few minutes and following the advice outlined here, you should easily be able to squeeze out a few extra hours of productivity from your work week.

About The Author

Patrick spends his days at Storagepipe, which offers online backup and email archiving systems that automate manual backup and email management processes.