The 4 Simple Steps to Manage your emails, Effeciently

Emails, Emails, Emails, how did we survive without them? More and more on Time Management Training Courses we hear of the amount of time people are spending or wasting on emails every day. From a time management point of view the question has to be ‘are you managing your emails or are your emails managing you?’ The good news is that there are some key things you should do to manage your emails. 1. Turn off your email alert; you know the old story ‘curiosity kills the cat’. All too often we find ourselves in the middle of an extremely important task and the next thing the email alert sounds on our laptop and we stop what we are doing, open our inbox and read the email. From a time management perspective this is a disaster. Not only have we lost time by opening the email, reading it etc, but it is the momentum that we have lost on the task we were doing before the email arrived. 2. Set up particular times in the day when you check your emails, this way you will be managing your mail as opposed to your mail managing you. On any Time Management Training Courses you will be told that by grouping things together you will gain momentum, emails being checked at certain times a day will mean you can group your work better. 3. Clear your inbox, working with a full inbox is a little like working on a cluttered desk, the problem with this is that you will find your eyes wondering to other items in your inbox and you will then open the message look at it and more than likely do nothing. To be honest from a time management view to ask you to spend hours clearing your inbox now of the 4000 messages is not good advice, but why not clear your inbox into a folder and date it today—you have lost nothing it is still there but your inbox is now clear and you can do your utmost to manage your inbox going forward 4. Make a decision on every email you receive, it is a little like years ago when we would learn on time management courses to get into the habit of ‘handling each piece of paper once’ the same principle applies to emails. There are really only 4 things you can do with an email: Answer it now Forward to some one else to deal withr Delete itr File for another day At a recent Time Management Training Courses some one suggested you use the acronym WRAP W stands for waste (same as delete) R stands for refer (forward to someone else to deal with) A stands for answer it now P stands for place in a folder Hopefully if you put some of these time management training tips into practice you will manage your emails as opposed to your emails managing you and you will see your time management improve