Email Inbox Maintenance
In this day and age, there is no form of communication more common than electronic mail. It is increasingly important to keep your email inbox as clean as possible. This article will offer some tips to help you to keep a more organized inbox.
Configure Rules, Filters, and/or Labels
Today’s email programs and online services offers a variety of ways to configure rules, filters, and labels to help organize incoming emails. A starting point for approaching what to organize firstly is to consider which emails are most important to you. Maybe you are working on a project and you need relavent emails to stand out above the rest. Make the messages from that client to take precedence and you will enjoy better communications. Here are some ideas for organizing important (and not so important!) messages in your inbox:
- Create folders and route incoming messages while considering your hottest clients.
- Set “high priority” status to certain incoming messages. If you shop on EBay, then set the priority to high for incoming EBay messages to make it easier to see all of the goodies that you are winning!
- Filter out common spam words that you are certain you have absolutely no interest in seeing, i.e., “Viagra”, etc. and you will see a quick decrease in the overall volume of your email inbox.
Do NOT Fear The Delete Button
After reading an email message, take action on that message right then! Do not put off responding to the message because too often than not, we forget to return to those messages. It is just a fact of life. It is best if you set aside specific moments in time to check you email to begin with. Think to yourself, “Ok, I’m going to check my messages now,” knowing that you will have a few minutes to respond to them. This change in your behavior will prove invaluable in very short time.
If you have identified an email as one that does not require a response, do NOT wait to delete it later. Dump it now! Do not fear the delete button if you are ‘riding the fence’ on an email message. You know the difference between an important message and one that has simply piqued your interest a bit.
Stop Writing Books
Most people wish to communicate effectively with their recipients and so it is always best to send short and concise emails. When is it best to do so? Always. Again, when? A-L-W-A-Y-S! If you find yourself ‘getting into a groove’ while writing an email, take a moment to think if it is better to deliver the message via telephone or maybe to type the notes of your message in a document to review before that telephone call. While it is very important to capture the muse of a lengthy email, it is not efficient to write what can be spoken more quickly. If you spend more than 5 minutes on a given email, it may be better to consider another form of communication for the message.
Do Not Use Email As A Calendar
Who hasn’t sent themselves an ’email reminder’ of an important event. We all have. This is not a good practice, though, so find alternate ways to remember the important event. There are a gazillion calendar and reminder programs and services available to all of use. Use those programs or services because an email reminder will become lost in the mix and we all know what happens then…
Do Not Reply To Spam
This may seem like a simple rule, but is it really? You have received a message that you may or may not believe is spam and you are curious to know more about the content. The rule: DELETE THAT SUCKER. You can always investigate a topic online through search engines, but you cannot be sure that a questionable email is authentic just because it slipped by your anti-virus. Do not play around with the possibilities of opening that questionable email message, because there are some extremely clever hackers out there.
Weekly Cleanup
A final tip is to make time EACH WEEK to swim around your inbox in effort to delete the emails that slid by all of your organizing efforts. Chances are that if a message is a week or two old, it no longer has much importance in terms of responding, anyway. Do not be afraid to delete old messages.
We hope that this article helps you to have and to maintain a much more streamlined and organized email inbox. For those of you who are interested in learning the best ways to perform computer maintenance, visit the following link: