If you’ve bought multiple email accounts, chances are you’re feeling snowed under by the sheer daily volume. Control it before it controls you: a clean inbox will effectively increase your productivity. According to various polls we can spend up to 13 hours a week looking at out virtual mail, writing or responding to messages and checking our Facebook or Twitter accounts. In addition, 28% of people check their emails multiple times a day and over 50% at least once daily.
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So for the email enthusiasts, here are some tips to manage your email accounts:
Filter what you want
We don’t want to read every email we receive so get a good spam filter system to sort the wheat from the chaff. Trust it to do its job but glance at the contents of the junk folder now and again to check it hasn’t thrown out anything you actually want. Take a look Google’s Priority Inbox System or Apples VIP: fight! as a great example. It will remember your habits, what you ditch and what you open and you can adjust settings to avoid mistakes.
Others, like Email Tray, have an anti-phishing function that will show corporate logos or red markers so that you know what is genuine and what is spam. Some will allow you to reschedule messages that are not urgent but will need to be addressed at some future point.
There’s an app for that
Find an app or a Gmail widget which allows you to preview images, feeds, videos that are coming into your inbox so that you can decide which to follow and which to ignore.
Priorities
Decide what is personal and important and what can wait or be deleted quickly. Use temporary mail addresses for anything that is not personal so that you can delete contact in the future if it gets full of spam or you encounter any problems.
Manage your time and your inbox will follow
Set yourself a block of time each day to check your inbox and keep to it. It is so easy to get distracted so stick to your schedule and keep your inbox in check.
Don’t answer immediately
Once you answer a message instantly you can often get locked in an ongoing conversation so refrain from sending instant responses, even to friends. Finish checking your emails before beginning your responses – that way once you’ve finished you can close your emails down until next time rather than getting caught in multiple conversations.
Turn off notifications
To avoid being alerted to new messages, turn off notification features on your phone and other smart devices. Unsubscribe to anything that you don’t want to be updated on regularly by adjusting settings for groups, pages and other accounts on these sites.
Be ruthless
Finally, the easiest way to manage your inbox is to be ruthless. Don’t spend more time than you have to sifting through messages and be very careful about who you give this important contact detail to. Always make sure unsubscribe boxes are ticked when setting up accounts with online retailers, for example, and considering setting up a separate account which you use purely for business or job hunting purposes to differentiate between that and your personal correspondence.