How to manage your inbox

Whilst email is a brilliant tool, it can also cause some stress and bring additional chaos into our lives. Whether its managing to keep up to date, or the constant notifications distracting you from other more important tasks. In this blog I will give you some practical tactics for how to keep in control, some tips to organise your inbox and how to minimise distraction

​​​​​​​Let’s get on with some Dos and Don’ts! ​​​​​​​​ *DO have regular slots each day where you check your emails

Having your email open all the time means it is too tempting to switch away from the (likely more important) thing that you are working on to see if anyone has emailed you – or worse, the notifications ping and you are distracted and look at the incoming emails, which likely contain other people’s priorities rather than your own. In addition – this causes us to “task switch” which means that instead of being more productive which is what we might think we are doing, studies have shown that we ens up being up to 40% less productive than if we stick to one task at a time. The answer? Block out 2 times during the day that are allocated “email time” and don’t check your emails outside of this time – it works!

​​​​​​​​ *DO reply to anything that will take less than 2 minutes as you read it​​​​​​​​

During your allocated “email checking time”, if you come across anything that will take less than 2 minutes to do then do it immediately. The process of reading it, then coming back to it another time would take WAY more time and energy than doing it immediately. With practice you will soon learn what can meet your 2 minute criteria and what will drag on longer.

*DO add any task that is longer than 2 mins to your to-do list as a task to be prioritized later ​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​Following on from “Do anything that is less than 2 minutes”, it follows that you should not try to do anything that will take you longer than 2 minutes. There are a couple of reasons for that. 1. You will blow your email checking time allowance without being able to check through all your emails, and 2… how do you know that that is the most important thing to be spending time on? You don’t! So add it to your ONE list and prioritise it along with everything else you have to do

*DON'T have your email notifications switched on -

its so distracting and a bad use of time to keep task switching​​​​​​​​- turn off those notifications!

*DON'T let other peoples definitions of "urgent" decide your priorities​​​​​​​​

We all have a tendency to want to please others – but when this is at the detriment of our own priorities it is something we need to try and control. So it’s really important to balance the needs of others, or be able to see the bigger picture in terms of the needs of the organisation you work for as a whole, and spend your precious time working on the RIGHT things.

*DON'T Constantly check your emails and reply all day ​​​​​​​​​​​​​

See “Do” number 1! This is so important ive included it here too

*DON’T have loads of different folders to file emails into.

If you are looking for tips for organising outlook inbox - look no further! Today’s email apps have such fantastic search functions it makes much more sense to have few, or no, folders and just archive emails – you can then easily search in one place for any previous emails that you are looking for – simples!

Have a look here at how I work with business Founders and with Larger organisations to tackle topics like this and more