If you’re using your email inbox as a task list, you’re probably seeing it get out of control. Even if you’re flagging important emails and looking at your flagged email daily, are you feeling a little worn-down with how many emails you’re seeing? Seeing a long to-do list or a stack of actionable emails can leave you feeling like throwing in the towel.
You know that you can’t give up. You need to get through them […]
If you have a smartphone, you probably do. Apple’s iOS first popularized the use of swipe gestures such as swiping between app screens. In later iOS updates, Apple added more swipe gestures, such as swiping down to see notifications. Now, smartphone applications are adding their own swipe gestures, which are similar to clicking on something in a computer application and then selecting an action. But swiping is so much simpler, isn’t it?
When you think about […]
If you’re like me, you spend a good part of the day in front of a computer. I have several to-do lists, consisting of project tasks, business tasks, and personal tasks. Throughout the day, I’m also getting phone calls and emails.
The phone calls are easy because they’re immediate.
I take notes during the call, bring up my calendar for scheduling, and then fill in my intake form with the information that I’ve written down. I can […]
Staying on top of email chaos is not easy.
Even after you’ve followed the steps to manage your email inbox (see my blog post here: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive ), you still need to “deal with” those emails that require a follow-up task. How do you make sure that you get those done, and that they don’t get lost in the daily shuffle?
The easiest way is to have a daily routine to review and act […]
If you’ve gone through the process of email organization (see my blog post here: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive), then you should have a streamlined inbox with just the most important emails. You also should have a daily routine of dealing with those emails that consists of:
Evaluating and Categorizing
Acting On, Filing, or Flagging by Priority
Flagging an email in Outlook actually assigns a follow-up task.
If your email account is a POP account, this is pretty […]
Well, it finally happened. Your client, or customer, or boss, or best friend feels put out or confused. That’s because you never responded to his or her email.
Why? Because you missed it. Perhaps you’re still working on your inbox organization. Or maybe you haven’t gotten around to getting organized yet. Even if you do have a handle on your inbox most of the time, there are always those times when you fall behind.
The first thing […]
If you’re like most people, you’re getting too many emails in your inbox.
An overflowing inbox can create stress and cause you worry that you’re missing important emails.
One way to reduce the number of emails going into your inbox is to unsubscribe to as many automatic emails as possible, such as the ones from shopping sites that add you to their newsletter or promotions list. However, there still may be automatic emails that you would […]
What does “productive” mean to you?
The first step towards productive email management may be to identify your goals. For most of us, it means a few things:
Not missing important emails
Not having to spend hours of our time picking out the important emails
Quickly finding an email when we need it
Being able to scan the inbox for important items
One popular productivity method is called “Getting Things Done” (or GTD), first made popular by David Allen’s book in […]
How did we get here with our email overload?
If you read my last blog post here: Drowning in Email, you may have been amused by the trip back to 1980. I chose this date because it was before most people had email.
Email was actually invented back in 1971.
You can read about it here: The Man Who Made You Put Away Your Pen. AOL was the first widely-used public email platform, and many of you […]
Dial back time (you’ll have to imagine if you’re too young) to 1980.
Imagine your morning routine: you rise, shower, eat breakfast, get in the car (or not), and get to work. You sit down at your desk, and you’re looking at a pile of nearly 100 envelopes that have been delivered overnight, stacked in front of pile after pile of envelopes that you haven’t gotten to in the previous days. You start going through the […]
