Every day, more than 269 billion emails are sent and sometimes it feels as though they are all ending up in our own, individual inbox. Volumes are only set to increase, given that more employees are working remotely, resulting in a greater reliance on electronic messages. It’s easy to spend a large portion of your working day just trying to make a dent in your backlog, to the detriment of other, often more pressing, priorities. The average worker spent 13 hours a week dealing with emails in 2012. Here are four strategies that might help you to reduce this burden, improve productivity and streamline internal communication.
Use a system
Filtering your inbox allows you to prioritise which messages need a response straight away, which ones can wait until you’ve completed more important tasks and those that require no action. Creating rules within your email program to create automated filters is an effective way to reduce admin time and take control of your inbox. You may want to separate emails sent by customers from those received from colleagues, or automatically mark messages containing certain words as ‘high priority’.
Set email windows
Constantly and immediately checking emails when you arrive prevents you from focusing on the work you should be doing. If you are checking email ad hoc throughout the day, this time will quickly add up and could seriously impact your productivity and wellbeing. Hence, set email windows so that you do not keep checking your email every second.
Change your own email habits
To reduce those emails that are in response to your own, you need to change your email habits. To do this, there’s a bit of dedication required to reach a point at which you’re sending only those messages that need to be sent, but the reward is a reduction in the number of emails you’re receiving, lowered stress levels and increased productivity.
Set expectations
Do you receive work emails out of hours or even when you’re on annual leave? Do your colleagues assume that, regardless of the time or your location, you’ll reply? To reduce the volume of out-of-hours work emails you receive, you’ll need to set new, clear boundaries and expectations. The truth is you have the right to ignore emails outside of work hours took but only a handful will exercise this right. Overuse of smartphones has been blamed by many for the rising prevalence of burn out and fatigue among employees.
Get one central email address
Far too many people have more than one email address. That makes sense, of course. You need your primary work email address, perhaps a personal one too and maybe “special” email addresses for marketing and so on. You might have another that is linked to a social media account, and you could have further email addresses for particular logins. Multiple email addresses lead to problems, such as the need to log in to different services. However, the most significant drain on your productivity is psychological. That’s because you know you have multiple email addresses and your brain continually worries that you might not have checked one service or another. So you get subconscious signals to check your personal email or to have a look at those individual email addresses. This psychologically triggered checking behaviour wastes time. Plus it is a waste of mental energy, reducing your overall performance.