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How much time do you waste each day wading through endless emails? For most of us, keeping on top of your inbox can feel like an uphill battle. The great news is that it really doesn’t have to be that way. Twenty Ten Talent wants to help, so starting this month we’ve partnered with SaneBox to help you conquer your inbox.
Once a month we’ll be sharing genius email hacks and straightforward tips to help you take back control if you find yourself drowning in email like I was.
To kick things off, here are 3 email commandments to help you manage your inbox and get on with what really matters.
Commandment #1 – Stop playing Tetris
Email is like Tetris. No matter how fast you are, there’s always more coming, and faster. The average person receives over 100 emails a day and according to a recent McKinsey study we spend 13 hours a week reading and replying to emails. Email overload is getting worse, not better.
Something has to change and it starts with you. If you can change the way you think about email, it will change the way you process it for good.
Commandment #2 – Don’t let email be your number one priority
Be proactive and focus on your own to-do list. This can be really hard, as email often becomes a to-do list that other people get to write on. To help deal with this, scan your inbox for urgent or important items in the morning, and then work on your top priorities. Dedicate blocks of time to processing email and treat email processing as one of your priorities and not the default priority number one.
If you find yourself being sucked into dealing with emails ask yourself “is this really the best use of time right now?” Eventually it will be but make a conscious decision about when you work through emails and when you focus on more important tasks.
Commandment #3 – Not all emails are created equal
Every email interface gives the same amount of real estate on the screen to each message. This is bad, because this tricks our subconscious into thinking every email is equally important. That kind of thinking is wrong, as some emails need to be dealt with right away, some can wait and others should be archived or deleted in bulk because they really are unimportant.
SaneBox data shows on average 58% of emails we receive are unimportant. To help deal with this SaneBox filters out the unimportant emails into the SaneLater folder so you can archive or delete the unimportant emails all at once. You can also move the non-urgent or unimportant emails into a Snooze folder. The result? Your inbox only contains emails that you need to deal with today. Even better, if you don’t get to all of them, it’s not a problem, just snooze them till tomorrow.
Remember the 3 commandments each time you open your inbox and before you know it, it will start to make a world of difference to how you work through emails.
Learn more over at sanebox.com
Post by Octavia Goredema @OctaviaGoredema
Photography Credit: #WOCinTech Chat
