Organize Your Email Communication for Increased Productivity

For most of us natural born organizers, nothing is more annoyingly stressful than the glaring red notification bubble on our email inbox. Email is the fastest, most efficient, and most used form of communication in business today; and based on the always growing number on that inbox notification bubble? It shows no sign of easing up anytime soon. If you want to streamline your communication process and increase productivity the place to start is email organization. Read below for three quick things our experts suggest to quickly get your email communication sorted out.

You want to start organizing your email communication the same way you’d start organizing a storage closet: declutter. Just as it would be with tangible items in a storage closet, your inbox is likely stuffed with old, now useless, unimportant, and irrelevant emails taking up valuable space. Begin by deleting emails that you have absolutely no use for going forward. Then, begin filing away old messages that should still be saved for reference. Old messages that have already been responded to or are completed should be filed into a designated folder so that you can refer to them in the future if needed.

You can also be proactive and help prevent future clutter by unsubscribing to receive emails from stores or companies that are no longer relevant to you. If you don’t want to unsubscribe entirely, most sites today allow you to customize your communication settings. Many times, you can lessen the number and type of emails you receive from each company. If you are receiving three per day, consider adjusting your account settings to minimize that to once a day or twice a week. You may also want to apply a filter for any non-important emails (such as social media notifications, store newsletters, etc.). You can change your email settings so that when these emails come through the filter, they’ll reroute to a separate folder and not clog up your inbox.

As it is important with physical organization, categorizing and labeling your email folders is critical for digital organization as well. If you’re decluttering your inbox, setting up filters, and creating folders to save emails for future reference: you’re going to want these files to be easy to find when the time comes that you need them. Categorize the file folders by business type/projects/groups. You can also create sub-categories to include names for each sender pertaining to that project, group, etc. Again, rules or filters can be set up so that your email account will sort certain emails into designated folders automatically as they are received. (You could design these filters to separate based on the sender, topic, client, project, etc.)

The last thing you want to consider doing to help increase your email communication productivity is create templates and add other application tools to your account. If you have certain emails you find yourself sending regularly, create and save a template so you can cut and paste each time you need to send it to a new recipient. This will save you a lot of time by not having to retype a similar message each instance. As you have for all the other emails in your account, create a “Templates” folder full of the drafts so that you can quickly access each for copying/pasting when you need to send.

Depending on your business, you should look into helpful productivity applications or tools available outside of the standard email platform functions. For example, find an app that allows you to schedule emails. This tool will help boost productivity by giving you the freedom to write emails at your convenience, but then ensure the communication will be delivered at the most optimal time for the recipient to get them.

Organizing your email folders, decluttering the inbox, creating an efficient digital filing system, applying filters, and downloading productivity tools are all small actions you can take now, to save you large amounts of time every day in the future. If you’re in over your head because your inbox clutter is in the six-figure range, or, even if you simply want guidance on the various email management applications available, let us know! Our inbox at info@sortedout.com is organized to perfection and we’ll be able to respond and get started promptly.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Tonia