At Aspire we know that your time is precious, and it’s not always easy to take time out to read a book or attend a programme. So on this page we’ll bring you Top Tips for dealing with a management or leadership challenge every month.
This month – Managing Your Inbox
The bigger your inbox gets, the more overwhelming it can become! Read on for some Top Tips for Managing Your Inbox….
1. Go through your emails and identify any actions that conform to the “two minute rule” – if the email can be dealt with in 2 minutes JUST DO IT!
2. Identify any e-mails that will take a significant amount of time to complete. For each of these, create a task in Outlook (use shortcut CTRL-Shift-K and use CTRL-C to copy any related emails into the task body). You can use this as your daily to-do list for regular review.
3. You can create some additional folders – although not too many or the system becomes unwieldy and you will have too many separate inboxes to process. Here are some examples:
@Action – a holding area for emails that need to be turned into tasks – useful when you are in a rush or on your mobile.
@Hold – a holding area for emails you really want to read “properly” later (use with extreme caution).
@CC - a destination for less-important stuff you want redirecting, by setting up a rule for e-mails you are on the CC line of.
Use as few subfolders here as possible. If your system is too complex it becomes unusable.
4. If the e-mail doesn’t need to be dealt with by you, forward it to the right colleague, with a brief explanation of what needs doing, and by when. You can then create a task in Outlook (see above) to remind you when it needs following up.
5. Often e-mails stay in our inboxes to remind us to chase something at a later date. You can “flag” these items which creates a task which will pop up in your to do list on the day you want to chase it. You can then move these flagged items into a “flagged” folder, which gets them out of your inbox.
5. Press “delete.” Oh happy days! However, before you get too carried away with the delete key, think through the consequences by asking yourself “What would happen if I didn’t respond to this?”
Remember, if you don’t control your inbox, then it will quickly control you!