Six Tips to Nix Email Productivity Killers

Clearly, email has brought us many advantages.  We all appreciate the instantaneous connections we can create with colleagues, friends and family no matter where they may be located.  Likewise, we are able to communicate with large groups all at once and notify those audiences of important opportunities or issues immediately.

On the flip side, do you sometimes dread the following situations?

• Opening your email after time away from the office knowing that you may spend the next hour or more sorting through a myriad of notifications, many of which are not relevant to you at all?
• Or, do you find that your inbox just continues to grow out of control and you lose sight of important emails in the ladder that you meant to respond to but were all too quickly buried?
• Maybe you are working on your plan for the day, and then it is 5 o’clock and you didn’t get anything done because you were distracted by emails all day.
• On top of that, you receive so many emails that frequently your system shuts down because it is beyond capacity and you can’t get in nor can you receive new emails.

 

Email frustrations abound.  Some are in your control and some are not.  You can’t control how many emails anyone sends you, but you can control how they are dealt with once received.  One thing you can count on; email traffic will continue to escalate.   Here are some tips to make your email life easier:

 

Tip #1 – Turn Off Your Email Alerts

Dr. Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.  Many users don’t realize that these notifications can be managed or even eliminated to avoid distractions.  Users can then choose to check email on a schedule that is more conducive to productivity.

 

Tip #2 – Set a Schedule for Checking Email

Many of us check email far more often than necessary.  Generally, there is nothing of great import or anything that requires immediate attention.  Set a schedule to check email first thing in the morning and then again in late afternoon to free yourself from distractions and to maintain your focus on priorities for the day.

 

Tip #3 – Set Your Email Client to Display the First Few Lines of the Email

You don’t need much information to know if the email is important to you or not.  This will help you avoid spending too much time on an email that is not worth your attention.

 

Tip # 4 – Setup Rules to Send Emails to Folders

You can configure your emails to go to folders enabling you to check all of the updates on a particular subject at once, thereby keeping you on task for a consistent initiative or project.  These folders can be created in your email system and become subfolders in your inbox.

 

Tip #5 – Archive Emails on a Shared Drive

Emails saved to archive folders on your computer’s hard drive are no longer stored on the server and can be lost when the user switches machines or the machine crashes.   A better practice is to delete emails you don’t need and store emails and large files (Pictures, PDFs and documents) you do need on a shared drive.

 

Tip #6 – Consider Moving to Email Delivered in the Cloud from NetStandard

To avoid overloading email capacity and to enable employees to check email from home to keep work hours more productive, many companies are moving their email to NetStandard’s Myappsanywhere.  Email delivered through Myappsanywhere helps companies save money, increase mobility and gain other features such as larger mailbox sizes and encryption.  As traffic increases, you will eliminate being locked out of your email due to overload which results in lower productivity.  NetStandard offers unlimited mailbox sizes, larger attachment capacity, message encryption, message level backup and anti-spam at significant savings versus on-premise solutions.  Further, your technical specialists will be relieved of the responsibility of maintaining and upgrading your email system because that is all included in the low monthly fee and delivered by NetStandard.