Are you receiving more email?

The majority of us are either working from home or have some of our team working from home at the moment. Many of our clients are telling us that the volume of email that they are receiving has gone up significantly while we’ve been working remotely.

There are 3 key areas that we need to focus on to be the master rather than the slave of our Inbox – processing, communication and automation.

1. Processing. It’s easy to flag an email that needs actioning or leaving emails in the inbox when we are waiting for a reply. However, when we don’t have a good process for managing email, emails can fall through the cracks and we often look at the email several times before we decide what to do with it. Every email is either deleted, filed or converted in to a task if it needs to be actioned.
2. Communication – email protocols need to be established as team. Otherwise, Reply All will be overused, there will be poor subject lines and you may receive long emails with no real call to action.
3. Automation – there’s a significant portion of emails that come in to our Inbox which are what I call noise. Newsletters, notifications, Linkedin updates and cc’d mail. Setting up rules to automatically filter these emails in to a folder (or deleting) and checking them in your downtime can help reduce the large volume of email that you receive.