Nowadays email had fallen out of favor for many. After almost 50 years of existence, it became more of an annoyance and less of a tool. But it is still here with us, and whether it’s a personal choice or imposed to use by your employer, most of us are using email every day. So, why not to use it more effectively?
I argue that email still has some useful life, and in this article, I share some of the tricks on how to make it work for your (again).
The email has many problems, but if you address just one of them – the deluge of unsolicited and unnecessary messages that overwhelm our inboxes – you will be much happier with your email.
To do that, here are three tricks that worked for me.
- Create a rule to filter out messages that contain “unsubscribe” word. That will take care of the vast majority of the stuff that you don’t want to see daily. Filter those messages into a separate folder that you can look at periodically or ignore it altogether. The newsletters, advertisements, unwanted notifications and spam would be filtered and moved to that folder. Legitimate companies are required to provide the way to opt-out in the message, so use it to your advantage. Occasionally you would miss a message or two, and this is why I recommend to periodically (very infrequently) scan that “unsubscribe” folder.
- Move all your messages from your inbox to the Archive folder. All of the email applications have Archive – the place where messages are out of the Inbox, but still in the system, not deleted, but just out of the view. This will clear your Inbox and relieve your burden of looking through hundreds of messages daily. After implementing step 1) your Inbox will be filling up much, much slower and mostly with useful messages. Not ready for this big drastic step – start by moving messages that are more than a month old.
- Learn how to search your emails from Archive using date, sender, keywords, attachments and other parameters, so you have confidence that your email will support you when you need it. This skill will come with practice.
Along with these three tips you have to follow basic email “hygiene”:
- Don’t check emails constantly. Unless you are in a specific job that requires you always be accessible, checking email often isn’t needed but done out of the habit, often unintentionally. The toll of distraction is huge, so don’t do it. Take this as an example – you don’t check your postal mailbox several times a day, waiting for something to come in.
- Use touch-it-once approach, such as if you opened email message on your device, do something with it, not just read and close. Because if you close it without action, you would need to do it again, perhaps several times over. Instead, decide right there whether you will delete, forward, keep for your to-do or archive it.
- Don’t use your email as a to-do list. My inbox isn’t empty, but I generally only keep items there that require small actions or responses, or I am actively working on them. If email message calls for a project-like, large task, capture it elsewhere, like your to-do list.
- Be careful with “unsubscribe” links in your email – sometimes they lead you to the other website and that will increase your spam load. You can legitimately unsubscribe but verify where the link is pointing to first.
Email may be on the last leg of useful life and in many organizations is being replaced by other collaboration tools. We don’t know when this replacement would be a commonplace, so the best strategy now is to change the way we are handling email. And, who knows, perhaps for whatever technology will replace email, these will still be useful tips.
Happy emailing!