Category: Email Management

It takes time to get through emails on a daily basis. Even if you follow good email organization (see my blog post here: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive), it takes a lot of time to read and respond to the important emails and to follow up on the less important ones.

If you find yourself responding in a similar way to certain emails, then you can use “canned” email responses to work more efficiently.

Let’s say, for example, you get a lot of requests for information that you have to research. You may find yourself responding often with: “Thanks for your inquiry. I’ll look into that and get back to you by the end of the week.” For another example, you may get a lot of requests for one-on-one meetings and you’re responding with “Thanks, I’d love to meet with you. Could you please send me your availability for next week?”.

Rather than take the time to type those email responses over and over, it’s easier to just hit “Reply”, select a saved template, and then hit “Send”.

Here are 3 ways to set up canned responses:

1. If you’re using email with a CRM system, you can set up email templates for quick responses.
2. If you’re using Outlook or Mac Mail you can set up different signatures and use them as templates. Here how to do it for Outlook: How to Create Outlook Email Signature, and for Mac Mail: Include Signatures in Messages.
3. If you’re using Gmail, you can use “canned responses”. Here’s how: Gmail Canned Responses.

A personal response is always best but not always practical with our email overwhelm. You do need to be careful about choosing the correct template and reviewing your email response before sending. Also check the To: field to make sure that the correct response is going to the correct person.

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”

 

 

I generally advise my clients to install a task management application and to integrate it with email, so that they’re not using email to manage tasks. I write about that here: How to Integrate Email with Task Management.

Google, with its Inbox app, is trying to get people to do the opposite – to dump the task management app and use email instead. You can read more about Google’s Inbox here: How to Manage Your Gmail Inbox.

There is an argument to be made here. One could make the point that we spend a lot of time in the email application. Hence, it’s a context switch and a mind switch to open another application in order to turn an email into a task.

It can be hard to get into good habits with email and tasks integration.

So what if we did the opposite routine and turned our tasks into emails instead? In that scenario, when you have a new task to complete, you could just compose an email and send it to yourself. (You may already be doing that anyway.)

At first glance, it seems counter-productive. Our inboxes are already overflowing and it doesn’t seem to make sense to add to that overwhelm. But if you practice good email management (read my blog post here: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive), you can filter the tasks that you send to yourself into a folder. You would then work in that folder for your task management. (In Google’s Inbox, filters are called “bundles”.)

It’s easy to manage emails/tasks with Google’s Inbox app.

You can mark emails/tasks as done or you can “snooze” them until later. You can also set follow-up reminders.

There are certainly advantages to using a task management application, including list organization, prioritizing, and color-coding. But if you’re someone who’s struggling with your task management – keeping them organized or keeping a consistent routine – you might want to give Inbox a try. Here’s a more detailed article: How to Turn Google Into the Best To-do App.

You will still need to practice good habits by scheduling time every day to review your tasks bundle, complete tasks, snooze them, or schedule them.

Those tasks will not only be the ones that you email to yourself, but also emails from others that you need to follow up on. So when you’re going through your Primary inbox, your habit should be to move those emails that are follow-up tasks into your “Tasks” folder.

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”

The average business worker sends and receives over 120 business emails per day and spends nearly 30 percent of the workweek managing email. Together with personal email, 205 billion emails are sent emails each day—a number expected to increase over 16 percent to 246 billion emails in 2019.

Email overload can result in anxiety and a feeling of guilt.

It can be stressful to see your Inbox growing out of control and there is an increased risk of missing important email correspondence. Productivity drops when you have to spend too much time dealing with those emails, and distractions increase with those email notifications.

There are many approaches to managing your Inbox (read my blog post here about some of those methods: How to Control Today’s Pesky Email Overload). Whatever method you like to use, as you’re working through your Inbox, it can be helpful to remove some emails temporarily. You don’t really need those emails that you have to follow up on but that have to wait for some reason – for more information, for example, or for something else to be completed – to be in your way right now.

Moving those emails temporarily can make your Inbox cleaner and easier to deal with.

Here are some methods to manage those follow-ups emails:

1. Move them to an folder called “Later”. You just have to remember to take some time every day to deal with your “Later” folder.
2. Flag them for later follow-up and then sort your inbox by flag so that they’re grouped together. You can read about flagging here: How to Use Email Flagging.
3. Turn them into tasks and remove them from your Inbox. You can read about that here: How to Integrate Email with Task Management.
4. “Snooze” them. “Snoozing” means to send the email away and also pick what time it will show up again in your Inbox.

Need help with email management?

It’s very common to procrastinate on dealing with your email overload.

Does this sound familiar to you?

• You dread sitting down at your desk to look at email.
• You stay at your desk longer every day to try to stay on top of your inbox.
• The size of your inbox keeps increasing.
• You have not just emails from your co-workers, clients, friends, and family, but also emails from school lists, notifications from social networks, and newsletters from retailers, vendors, and consultants (including mine! Sign up here).

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to miss important emails in the clutter.

Email is still an important communication tool but email overload continues to increase every year, so it’s no longer possible to treat your inbox like it’s a to-do list that keeps growing and growing…

I practice good email organization according to my methods here: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive. Another way is the “Inbox Zero” technique as I wrote about here: Should you be worried about your email inbox?.

With my method, I still have emails sitting in my Inbox because I reference them frequently or because they’re linked to tasks that I need to follow up on. Today’s emails (that don’t get filtered first) continue to come into my Inbox and sit until I deal with them. That means that I sometimes still have an Inbox that grows and has to be culled back.

I recently read about another method that I found interesting, called “Yesterbox”. You can read about the method here: Yesterbox.

I still prefer to deal with emails as they arrive in my Inbox, but it’s not always possible, and it can be distracting. I think I’ll try the “Yesterbox” method and report back.

Here’s a good email management routine that fits well with the “Yesterbox” method.

I suggest blocking out some time every day to:

• Priorize and flag your emails
• Deal with the most important emails, or create follow-up tasks
• Move less important emails to a “Later” folder.

I also suggest blocking out some time every week to deal with the “Later” emails and to do clean-out of your other folders.

If you have a consistent routine, then you’ll find that you’ve become efficient and responsive with your email management. No more apologizing: “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see your email”!

Need help with email organization?

 

Email is becoming an inefficient way to communicate.

Does this sound like you?

• You dread sitting down at your desk to look at email and feel guilty and anxious at the sight of your overflowing inbox
• You stay at your desk longer every day to try to stay on top of your inbox.
• The size of your inbox keeps increasing.
• You have not just emails from your co-workers, clients, friends, and family, but also emails from school lists, notifications from social networks, and newsletters from retailers, vendors, and consultants (including mine! Sign up in the sidebar).
• You have missed important emails.

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to miss important emails in the clutter. Email is still an important communication tool but email volume continues to increase every year, so it’s no longer possible to treat your inbox like it’s a to-do list that keeps growing and growing.

Some, especially younger people, have turned to texting and messaging services as a more efficient way to communicate.

Some of the advantages of texting include:

• Texts are immediate and personal so you’re more likely to see them and to respond.
• Through your cell phone, you’re nearly always connected to the cell network, so you’ll see your text messages on the go.
• Texts are usually short and easy to deal with.
• Texts don’t usually have attachments that you have to open, read, and organize.
• Everyone with a cell phone can receive a text without special software.

Some of the disadvantages of texting include:

• Can’t share documents through texting (although I would argue that sharing is better served through cloud services, not email).
• Your text messages are not organized, so you can’t go back and find something.
• Texts are more intrusive than email.

Texting is great for a quick one-on-one conversation, but for groups, you need a better interface to add/remove members, search, and archive.

Messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, What’s App, and WeChat have many of the advantages of texting but work better for groups. (The main disadvantage is that your groups need to be all using the same app.)

This Wired article is a great place to learn about what’s being used right now for messaging apps for personal use: Time to Ditch Texting . For business use, the runaway winner right now is Slack.

Slack is for business teams and it’s more than just messaging. There are all kinds of app integrations for Slack and you can share documents, schedule meetings, create to-dos, etc. If you have a team at work or you collaborate with others on projects, then you should check out Slack.

You can’t get away from email completely. You’ll still need it to communicate with partners, vendors, schools, teachers, and all sorts of people. You can read my blog post here about how to stay on top of email: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive.

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”