I’m very much a “type A” person and that means a cluttered email inbox drives me nuts. So naturally, I always have to wade through the massive number of emails every day to make sure no stone is unturned and no inquiries are left without an answer. The problem? It is horribly time-consuming. These email efficiency tips reduced my daily inbox hits by 75%. Talk about a time saver!
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Unroll.me
One of the worst aspects of my personal inbox are the “social” and “promotional” emails. Gmail made an attempt to help by separating out social and promotion emails into their own inbox. The problem for me is I like some of these emails and would often miss them in the other inboxes until it was too late to take action.
The solution? Unroll.me. It rolls all your promotional and social emails into one daily digest. Now you’ll never miss an email but you also won’t get dozens of potentially useless emails every day.
Slack
In its most basic form, Slack is a messaging service with channels for each category (e.g. marketing, sales, support, etc). It may seem like an odd inclusion since most people either utilize Skype, Gmail’s chat, or another service already. Where Slack sets itself apart is integrations. Everything from Trello to GitHub to Uptime Robot can redirect email notifications to simple Slack messages.
For example, if one of our websites goes down, Uptime Robot will send out an alert email and another as soon as it is back up. With Slack, both of those notifications will be sent to the “support” channel where I can quickly a take a peek and then move on. With email, I’d have to take the time read each email and then delete them. It’s a subtle difference, but one that adds up.
Sharing Clouds
File sharing via email is a thing of the past. Gone are the days of flooding an inbox with emails due to attachment limits and files sizes. There’s really no excuse with free space from Dropbox, Drive, Amazon, and others.
The cloud is even more important for documents. Sending a Word file by email leaves document control up in the air. It is terribly difficult to track revisions with so many copies floating around. Keeping all documents in one place and editable online with Google Docs will reduce the number of emails, improve document control, and increase efficiency.
Email Efficiency Tips In Action
Armed with these new tips, the next step is to actually implement these tools. It’ll take a bit to get the initial setup right. And I know how tough it is to find time when you’re already swamped. You just have to force yourself. You’ll thank yourself later when you’re inbox “unread” number is zero!
