In today’s business environment, managing the volume of emails received daily can become a nightmare if you do not stay up to date with them.
Taking a couple of days off or just being away from your laptop for a few hours can turn your inbox into chaos and trying to catch up can take days as the emails just do not stop.
Here are a few things that I do, to try and help keep up to date:
- Firstly, to try and prioritise the emails that you need to focus on and store the others away to view at a later stage when you have time available.
Microsoft Outlook allows you to distinguish between emails that you need to “focus on” and “other emails”, on an email you right-click and select always move to other and any emails received from that source will be moved to your other folder and you can view them later when you have time.
If you are not using Outlook, you can always set up a separate folder for these emails and drop your emails you prefer reading later into that folder.
- The second point I would like to suggest is using rules. This is an option you can use to automatically tend to an email as soon as they land in your inbox.
There are multiple conditions that you can use to select from that when they occur you can automatically perform a selected action or actions for the email that is selected.
A simple example would be as follows:
- An email is received from a certain email address with a specific word or sentence in the subject
- The automatic action could be any or all the following:
- move the email to a specific folder
- forward it to a specific person or group
- send a reply using a template
These rules help especially when you receive a large volume of emails that are all to be dealt with in the same way or for emails that are consistently received time and time again. The rules can also be set up using exceptions to eliminate cases that you would prefer to deal with differently.
- A third point, Is to use quick steps. These contain the same conditions and actions as rules with the only difference being that they do not automatically get applied to an email. You would select the email and then apply the quickstep action to the email that is selected.
This is a fantastic tool to use when you have multiple actions that need to be applied to an email. With a simple click you can file an email to a specific folder and at the same time send 10 emails to different people with different content in each email.
By no means are the above tips an all-inclusive approach to managing your emails but they have helped me manage the volume that I receive and hopefully they can help you too.