When you open your inbox, do you get a feeling of overwhelm before you even start? Too many unanswered mails...or things you have to take a look at?
Hopefully, YOU do feel comfortable with that delete key or have a really good spam program, (if you don't, my new best friends are the folks at Internet Crusade who have developed E-Mail Plus, absolutely the BEST spam program I have ever used!).
This is all a long lead in to my tip for today:
You Have To Manage That Mail!!!!
To avoid the overwhelm and wasting time unproductively scanning mail, there are three habits to master:
1. Reduce Your Inbox to 20 or less
At 20 and below, you know you aren't going to have things fall through the cracks because they are buried. My friend, Marilyn Urso, of http://www.livillagerealty.com/ practices ZERO tolerance at the end of each day in her maximum effectiveness and reports delightful results!
Now, how do you do THAT???? Here's the answer:
2. Use Folders and Filters
In your email software, you can set up folders, just like you do with the rest of your data. A comprehensive filing system is a work in progress and will grow as you need it.
To set up a new file, when you are in the main screen of your email, click on NEW
and then FOLDER
You can designate where you want the folder to be placed. The default placement is alphabetical in your personal folder list. You can manipulate this a bit. A Symbol ~ or * or a number before the title will take those to the top.
Some Suggested Folders:
I have found these to be useful:
- Read Later
- Needs Reply
- Needs Action
- Folders for my Listservs
- Folders for specific topics (relo@joeann.com)
- Clients (and then sub-folders for each client)
- Travel (and then sub-folders by trip)
So, you get the idea and will no doubt have topics that are unique to you (family, organizations, etc.).
3. Now Use Filters
Sometimes, you'll just have the folders you have created and you'll manually drop and drag the emails from your inbox to where they belong, but the filter option makes much of this automatic! From your main screen, choose TOOLS/Rules and Alerts.
You can then set up as many rules as you want by clicking on new rule. If you are using a wildcard email account, you can have mail coming in already flagged by the "To",
so that instead of my listserv messages coming to Joeann@joeann.com, they come to ads@joeann.com I have a folder set up called "Ads", and a rule set up that says "when something arrives addressed to ads@joeann.com move it to my Ads Folder."
Those mails never even hit my inbox. You can control spam in much the same way by using an address like Tide@Joeann.com and have it moved to a Junk or Spam folder.
A good spam program will significantly reduce the mail coming in. Your use of filters and rules will reduce the mail in your inbox. Having folders will give you a place to hold and file everything else, leaving you with the ability to have a very few pieces of mail that are in your inbox!!! "YIPPEE!", you'll say, as you feel an increased amount of energy in not having to look at an overwhelming number of mails when you open your program. Goodbye busyness---Hello Productiveness!!!!!!
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