5 Tips for Email Maintenance

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Email consumes so much of our daily attention and business energy.  We spend so much time reading, responding, sorting message.  And, we waste time re-reading them also.  Think of your daily routine.  Do you find yourself combing through emails trying to find that one email pertaining to a client?  Do you find yourself reviewing an email for the 34th time unsure of what to do with it?

Here are 5 Easy Tips for Email Maintenance:

1. Wait one hour before checking email in the morning.
   Unless you have something time critical (pending orders) in your email inbox, wait until mid-morning to check your email.  Why?  Because it allows you to get WORK done.  It allows you to get something critical done before the barage of correspondence that consumes us every day.  I’ve had days where I sit down to answer email and don’t get up for several hours because they keeeeeeep coming.  Give yourself time to do WORK.  Here’s another related post on waiting to check email in the morning.
2. Set up folders to help you file and archive email
   If you don’t have folders set up yet, do so.  And, make them easy for you to work with.  I keep them broad enough so that I don’t have too search to hard through hundreds of folders.  I have about 20-40 folders (depending on the inbox.)  It can be as simple as “Colleagues” “Clients” “Personal” & “Travel”.
3. Auto-filter email
   Set filters on your email so that email on specific subjects or from certain senders automatically go to one of the archive folders.  For example, any email from one of the officers at Get Hitched Give Hope automatically goes to a “GHGH” folder.  These are typically not urgent and I can respond to them when I have a little more time.  Also, if you have newsletters that fill up your inbox, but you do enjoy receiving them, set up a filter that sends your messages to a “READ THIS” folder.  Then you can read your newsletters in one sitting.
4. Start a HABIT of reading each message only once
   A few months ago I realized that I was probably reading most messages 2-10 times.  This is because they would sit in my email inbox and I would revisit them until I was ready to respond.  I thought, “How much more efficient would I be if I took action on every email as soon as I saw it?”  And, so this became my mission: read a message, act on it, and archive or delete it.  This is a huge challenge to do.  How did I do it?

   - I set times in my day to only work on email.  Therefore, when I’m reading email I have the time to respond.
   - Ask yourself: What do I need to do NOW to act on this email and clear it out of my inbox?
   - If the email requires that I take some action at a later time, I add it to my to-do list.  Then, I file the message.
   - I archive or delete everything that is done with.
   - Any email that needs additional follow-up (these are usually messages that I can resolve within a day or two) stays in my inbox as “unread”.  Having it “unread” is a trigger to me that I need to act on it soon.
   - Keep my inbox to a maximum of 20-30 messages (MAX) with an ideal amount of 0-5 messages.  (HAHA!  This was hard to do… see my next point.)

5. Clear out your inbox for 30 minutes a day
   About a year ago I had ~879 messages in my main email inbox.  These were mostly messages of old “important” things that I felt I needed to have access to.  The funny thing is that in a sea of 879 messages I never accessed them.  They were mostly personal emails from friends/family that I wanted to read or keep.  Or, they were newsletters that I wanted to dig into.  Some of them were suppliers that I didn’t carry but “might” be interested in carrying down the road.  It was a little nutty.  So, I decided I was going to take on this behemoth and clear it out.  I committed myself to 30 minutes per day of only inbox cleaning.  During the 30 minutes I focused solely on old email only (nothing that just came in).  I wanted to archive or delete those  messages from 2004.  And, little by little, I did it.  About a month ago I was able to get to INBOX ZERO!  This is the first time in 5 years I have a clean inbox.  And, it has made the BIGGEST difference in the maintenance of my inbox… and my productivity in general.  The clutter was bogging me down.  It’s amazing what you can accomplish in 30 minutes a day over a long period of time.

So, there you have it… my quick-n-easy email tips for you!  How about you?  What are your email secrets?