Tips for Efficiently Dealing with Email

email One of the most important things that you need to learn if you want to increase your own productivity is to find efficient ways of dealing with the tasks that you have to deal with on a daily basis. Inefficient methods of handling daily tasks are one of the primary causes of reduced productivity. Taking the time to learn how to do these tasks in a truly efficient manner will end up saving you a lot of time (and reducing your stress) over the course of your lifetime.

One of the tasks that people often deal with inefficiently is the task of handling email. Some people check their email inboxes ten or more times per day. They look at the same email messages again and again before responding to them. Try simplifying your approach to email and you may find that your productivity immediately increases.

Some of the top tips to follow for dealing more efficiently with email include:

• Set aside specific times to check email. There is nothing that comes into your inbox that needs to be dealt with the minute that it arrives. Instead of checking email again and again, pick one or two times per day that you’ll deal with email and ignore it the rest of the time. Turn off all email alerts and new mail notifiers.

• Immediately open all spam and unwanted junk mail. Find the “unsubscribe” button or mark it as spam so that you don’t get mail from that same company again.

• Answer every email immediately if possible. Since you’re only reading email once or twice each day, focus on it at that time and get everything answered at once so you don’t have to come back to it.

• Extract all information that you need from the email. If there are dates to remember or phone numbers in the email then enter those into your calendar or phone immediately. The email can then be deleted or archived and never looked at again.

• Be efficient and complete when sending out an email. Use the subject header to clearly identify what the entire thing is about. This way, when a reply comes back, you’ll know right away what it is for. Enter a line saying “no reply necessary” if you don’t need to get a response back. This eliminates all of those one word emails confirming plans or thanking you. Create a unique email signature so that you don’t have to write out information that you send to everyone.

• Draft templates of emails that you send regularly. If you frequently send the same types of responses to people then those should be saved for easy cut-and-paste so that you don’t have to write them again and again. There are even email templates that you can download from the Internet so you don’t have to write the initial one yourself.

• Get familiar with your email program. Most programs offer a lot of tips and tricks for searching through emails, tagging them and storing them. Learn about these to make even more efficient use of your email time.

• Ask yourself if there’s a better option than email. Email can be a really efficient way of communicating. However, an IM conversation or a phone call or even a walk down the hall to another office could be more productive in some cases.

Learning to be efficient with email will go a long way towards increasing your total productivity. And once you’ve got this daily task under control, you can begin to work on increasing your efficiency with other daily tasks.