Maximize Productivity With Email Management: 3 Tips

Does your inbox always seem to be full even though you spend ages organizing it?

Luckily, there’s a way to quickly declutter your inbox and keep it organized without wasting precious hours.

Read the article below to find out how you can become more productive in your email management.

*This article is an abridged, adapted version of the blog post originally published on the Clockify blog: https://clockify.me/blog/productivity/email-management-best-practices/ 

#1: Stop overchecking your inbox

If you find yourself constantly opening your inbox to see whether you missed an important email, you’re not alone. An average American checks their email 14 times a day.

Compare that to the recommended 2-3 times daily, and it becomes clear that many of us need to change our work habits.

To avoid checking your inbox often, turn off notifications and schedule exactly when you will attend to emails each day.

In case you aren’t sure how to properly plan your email processing sessions during hectic work days — use an automated time tracker. This handy piece of software keeps a log of each app you use and how much time you spend on it.

Clockify Auto tracker

An automated time tracker helps you learn more about your daily work activities, allowing you to determine the best time to check and answer emails.

#2: Declutter your inbox

If your inbox contains tons of messages, chances are that many of them don’t require any action. This includes:

• App notifications,
• Promotional emails,
• Newsletters, and the like.

Such emails are typically not essential to business operations. So, to make business inbox less chaotic, delete them immediately.

To speed up this process, utilize the search bar. For example, let’s say you get a lot of notifications from one app. You can type in the app name, and all the relevant emails will pop up. Then, simply select and delete them all at once.

But what if you need to mass delete newsletters, promotional emails, or notifications from different senders?

One neat trick is to search for the word “unsubscribe” to filter them out.

Once you’ve removed unnecessary emails from your inbox, use a separate email address to sign up for promotional content. This way, your business email won’t get swamped with these types of messages again.

#3: Arrange emails according to priority using folders

To be efficient when processing emails, arrange them according to priority by sorting them into folders. 

If you’re having trouble prioritizing, a method like the Eisenhower matrix can help. Here’s an example of how you can name the folders to organize your inbox with this productivity method in mind:

▶️ Action required — for important and urgent emails you need to process yourself,

⏩ Forward — for urgent but not important emails you can send to someone else to process, and

⏸️ Later — for non-urgent but important emails you can put off.

To make sure this process doesn’t take forever, try automating it. For instance, set a rule in your email app to have emails from a specific sender be sent to the correct folder automatically. 

Similarly, some email clients also allow you to set up who you want the emails to be forwarded to when you add them to a specific folder. For illustration, you can set a rule for all emails you move to the Forward folder to be automatically forwarded to your assistant.

Moving your emails to designated folders makes it clear in what order you need to go through the messages. As long as you don’t make too many folders, you’ll be on the right path to efficient email management.

Bonus: Use Clockify to accurately track time spent on emails

To boost your productivity and control your inbox, try Clockify.

Clockify comes with many powerful time tracking and planning features to help you stay organized. Regarding email management specifically, we offer you the Clockify Gmail time tracking integration.

This is an add-on that allows you to track time on specific emails. You can then quickly turn that tracked time into a time entry.

Not only does this feature speed up the timekeeping process, but it also gives you a detailed overview of the time spent on each email.

Armed with this information, you can tweak your emailing habits to deal with your workload more efficiently.

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