The corporate world communicates primarily via emails. This leads to a huge load of emails incoming and outgoing from our email inboxes. Reading and appropriately responding to all these emails takes up lots of our email processing time. This leaves no time for other email management priorities like sorting and scheduling emails. These small factors are what lead us to reach Inbox zero.
Steps to reach Inbox zero
Reaching inbox zero is critical to a clean email inbox. The more sorted our inbox is, the easier it is to do the email management of it. The below given steps can prove instrumental for you to reach Inbox zero:
1. Email management mindset
In email management, we might lose a lot of time in deciding how to respond to a particular email. This furthermore hampers your productivity. Developing a habit of responding to emails using these 3 quick decisions, might be just what you need:
– If a message requires no action on your behalf, archive it immediately.
– When a message requires a simple reply that you do in a minute or less, do it right away—and then archive it immediately.
– If a message requires some level of thought or response that you can’t get to right away, snooze it to a time and date when you will be able to handle it. Thus the email could reappear exactly when you know you will have the time and energy to respond appropriately.
With these email management tips at your fingertips, respond to all your emails in the quickest way possible.
2. Email Templates can streamline inbox zero
Replying to emails can become a recurring task as we tend to receive a similar kind of email every day. Emails asking for a follow-up, or for a meeting, or about a task’s progress- the list is never-ending and yet recurring. Designing simple templates for such emails can be a great email management tip.
These templates could contain the basic structure of a common email, which you can modify every time you need to use it as an email management strategy. Saving these templates in a separate folder also saves time as you search for the perfect template. Many free services online like Beefree.io and Stripo can help you make these templates.
3. Calculate Productivity with Email Management
Email management is but a game of numbers. The amount of time you spend in the inbox, the amount of time you spend responding to an email, the number of times you visit your inbox in a day- all correspond to a loss of productivity. Only a schedule can put this mess of too many emails into its right place. You can calculate your email productivity using this calculator her
Email management apps like Mailman can be your savior here. With its Do Not Disturb feature, it helps you chalk out a schedule for how many times you can access your email inbox. Thus it makes sure that time isn’t wasted, while you focus on increasing your productivity.
4. Sort your emails to reach the inbox zero
Not using a proper email sorting system can spell havoc when one is dealing with too many emails every day. What often results from this is the inability to find an urgent email from the huge pile of emails. Important emails can easily get lost in this mess of unimportant emails. Moreover, these many emails can make it difficult to prioritize our email management strategies.
Sorting our emails in folders, labels using various filters makes it very easy to keep a track of your emails. Using filters that separate your emails based on the sender, the subject line, or even the deadline of the tasks can be very useful. These filters can then sort your emails into different folders. Thus you can reach out to emails in different folders and find the emails you need easily.
5. Email management software for you
The above email management tips can help you reach inbox zero but they might need consistent effort towards email processing. Thus email management feels like an additional chore and as important as this chore is, it does take up some amount of time. For a more automated experience, email management softwares can do the trick.
Amongst the many email management softwares in the market, Mailman is our top choice because of its many unique features. Using such apps not only saves you time but also helps you retain your sanity for trying to manage your emails.
Reach Inbox Zero today!
There are many email management strategies that promise you to reach inbox zero, but all tips fail without consistent efforts. Patience and regular monitoring of our email inboxes is crucial to reach Inbox zero. The efforts might be plenty but the end result is worth it. With a proper email management strategy in place, you can enjoy higher productivity levels as well as a happier mental space.
FAQs
About 20 percent of users have more than 21,000 emails even as many as 700,000 .
Deleting emails from the inbox frees up space only if you delete he emails from the Trash also.
Yes all emails, including the ones in the trash folder, take up space.
To select and delete consecutive emails, in the message list, click the first email, press and hold the Shift key, click the last email, and then press the Delete key.