Email Efficiency

Technology is doing great things for individuals and for business. Efficiencies are created when technology is applied the right way, and when utilized, we can realize more time and be more organized.

One way to realize these benefits is to handle email more efficiently. I have a routine that I engage in every few evenings a week. After arriving home and dropping my bags I go to the place where our U.S. Mail is stashed. Once found, I spend the next five minutes determining which pieces are non-junk and junk.

It’s getting tougher to determine junk from the good stuff… can you relate? I have to open mail to determine if it’s something important that I wasn’t prepared to see or if it’s just the next hot design by a firms marketing department. After that step then I make piles for monthly bills, things my wife needs to see, things that I need to respond to that are not monthly bills.

This is my life – well five minutes a few times a week anyway – and technology can’t fix this... yet.

However, my other mail experience, email is much cleaner and I get 10 times the amount of mail online than I do from the postman. Here are a couple of things I do and recommend to you:

1. Use a SPAM filtering service. My company uses Spam Soap and I highly recommend it. Spam Soap is a service where you register your email domain name and after doing so, every email that is sent to your address goes through SPAM SOAP servers before it can get to you. Every day they send you ONE email that reports the messages that have been filtered.

My quick estimate is that 99% of the crap that could come my way – doesn’t. Once in a while I’ll open the email they send to check and see if anything I’m looking for has stalled on their servers and sometimes I catch a newsletter… but it’s rare that a normal email from someone doesn’t make it through. Huge recommendation for Spam Soap.

2. Turn off your automatic retrieval of email. This may sound crazy, but think about this, what if every time a piece of mail was available to you the mailman drove by your house and but it in your mailbox and you were required to go out and get it. Every time…

What a waste of energy. Every email that arrives that you open immediately means something else you were working on just got the “mental shaft” and you have to start focusing all over again once you’ve read and dealt with the email. If it happen once a day that would be one thing, but what if it happens 30 to 50 times a day?

Turn off automatic send and receive and check mail at predetermined intervals and watch your productivity improve.

If someone is asking an important question and you feel a conversation starting up over email – pick up the phone and spend 2 minutes going over the details. Save your time and their time!

3. Create subfolders in your email program and set rules for incoming mail. I’m surprised at how few people use this important feature. When I open email in the morning I can actually watch 20 to 30 messages being sorted into the right “sub” mail box. Anything message left in the “main” Inbox is something I wasn’t expecting. Everything else is in its own box sorted by group or individual.

Try these three suggestions and see if you don’t become more efficient working with email.

TK