Email Efficiency

How to get on top of your Inbox

Try to cut down your junk mail.

Don't delete junk email automatically as your email rules will make sometimes make a mistake and put legitimate mail into the Deleted Items folder. You can also use rules to assign junk email a very low-priority category or move it to another folder.
Make a determined effort to get yourself removed from as many distribution lists as you can. It is a good idea to use a free email account, like Yahoo Hotmail for all transactions with retailers or the public.

Use your email program rules or filters to automatically prioritise your inbox.

Use those rules to assign each message a category based on what group the sender belongs to. If you designate the categories so that they sort in the same order as their probable importance, then you can quickly have your inbox listing the messages in roughly the order you want to deal with them.

Don't have multiple issues in an email.

Only address one issue per email. The recipient may ignore all but the first or last question. Then you will need another email to bring their attention to the topics they did not address. Be sure to provide adequate context for your messages. Quote previous messages carefully and watch out for references to people or things that you don't mention in the message.
If you do not need an answer to your email, then end the message with
No Reply Needed to discourage responses.

Don't encourage sending of useless , unnecessary emails.

Don't forward any message that asks you to forward it to everyone you know. Those messages are almost always hoaxes and you might get lots of messages back telling you so. If someone you know sends you messages you don't want (like jokes), ask them very politely to stop. Otherwise, they will keep sending them to you.

Shut off the auto-check.

Turn off the automatic checking device completely, or set it to something reasonable, like every half an hour. If you’re reading every new email as soon as it arrives, you are being diverted from other more pressing tasks. You should instead devote a certain time each day to answer your emails. Process, tag, respond to the urgent ones, then get back to work.

Pick off easy ones.

If you can deal with an email with a 1-2 line response, then do it now. Take some action, not dwell on it. Get it off your plate, and get back to work. On the other hand, don’t permit yourself to get caught up in composing an unnecessary 45-minute epistle. Your emails don't have to be the size of a small novel. This does not mean that you should write using phone text abbreviations or bypass standard grammar, capitalisation, and punctuation. Make sure that your well-written message is as concise as possible. That saves everyone time.

Save and reuse responses to questions that you get frequently.

If you keep a list of answers to questions you get regularly, you can cut and paste the answer into your reply. I do that with my trout fishing advice service. I get many of the same questions and it is a simple matter to cut & paste the reply.

Don't use styled text and fancy backgrounds.

If your messages are too pretty, people might think you don't have enough to do. Such fancy styles are invariably hard to read and slow down reading and comprehension.