Email time management tips

With the proliferation of free Internet services and the increase in businesses that utilize internal email systems, it is increasingly critical for email users to maximize their time-management skills. That’s true whether email is used primarily for business or personal reasons.

Granted, one way you can maximize your email efficiency is by not opening your email. In reality, that probably is not feasible. By simply ignoring your email, you may miss a critical business or personal message. The result could be disastrous.

1 -- Ask your email lists – business and professional -- to utilize nature-specific subject lines. This will help you to ascertain whether your incoming mail is business or personal, urgent or trivial. Knowing the urgency of a message will help you to determine how soon you need to read and respond to the contents. Once you know the nature, open and read urgent emails, and respond accordingly. Non-urgent emails, like jokes, can be read at a later time. Delete advertising-related email that you have no interest in, or which you consider spam.

2 -- Develop a plan for reading and responding to personal email, particularly in a work environment. Even employers, who have email systems, are likely to frown on time wasted by employees who spend hours reading personal emails. You can better manage your time spent on personal mail by allocating certain times in a day to check your email system – for example at lunch, at break, or at the end of the day.

Consider additional email addresses for personal use, or work-specific use. By using separate email addresses for personal email, or for email generated from a website or home business, you can pigeonhole the purpose of the email and its contents. This, in turn, will help you to ascertain its nature and urgency.

3 -- Use your email system to its fullest potential. Create folders for different topics or projects or by senders. Most email systems allow you to create folders, which are time management maximizers. Create folders, for example, for your family email, jokes, critical projects, ASAP follow-up issues, etc. Once email arrives, shift it to the appropriate folder and read it based on the email plan you have established.

Use time management features of your email system to alert you to when new mail has arrived, or that it is time to begin, or end, perusing email.

In improving your email time management skills, don’t overlook your subscriptions to internet newsletters or magazines (e-zines). These days, you can subscribe to email lists for everything from news, to product alerts to shopping deals to career-specific email newsletters and magazines (e-zines). If you already subscribed to any of these, analyze whether they are enhancing or impairing your overall business performance or personal achievement goals. Un-subscribe to any that are not. Analyze the remaining subscriptions to determine whether the amount of daily emails is causing a traffic jam on your computer.

Hint: If you consistently hit the delete button or have unread email for more than 2 days, chances are a subscription is too time-consuming. In this case, either request that you receive a compilation of emails at once – usually called a “digest” – or un-subscribe temporarily.

On the other hand, if you have not subscribed to any email newsletters or e-zines but are considering it, than subscribe with caution.

Finally, don’t forget to delete email from you inbox and trash can on a regular basis. This helps your system to run more smoothly, thus enhancing your overall time management skills.