Ways You Can Reduce Your Email Clutter Starting Today

Email is the blessing and bane of modern business. A tool that singlehandedly can change your marketing, communication, customer service, and project management for a company. At the same time, email has become the never ending relentless march of communication that becomes an impossible burden to keep tabs on in business.

The average office worker now spends 28% of their time shifting through email. Therefore, it would only make sense that we should help businesses reduce the email clutter in their inbox.

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Reduce Email Clutter Today

Have a Specific Time of the Day to Check Email

If you check your email all the time, you will never get anything done.

Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4 Hour Work Week, is the master of this. He checks his email once a week. While that might be a bit extreme for most entrepreneurs, remember that you do not have to be sitting in front of your email all day. That is a major distraction.

Create Boilerplate Responses

More than likely you have a few emails that you need to constantly send out via email. Create some boilerplate templates that you can easily replace, so you do not have to constantly write the same information over and over.

For example, as a freelance writer, clients are constantly asking me for my writing portfolio. I have an email in draft that I use repeatedly with links to different blog posts that I have written over the years. This saves me the trouble to constantly re-write them, and the client gets a good representation of my work. But please note: Make sure to customize the email enough for each recipient. While some parts of the email may be standard, others should address specific questions your recipient has.

Another idea is instead of creating boilerplate templates, turn some of these templates into video or a blog posts. This way, you might even stave off a few generic questions, and new prospects who come to your blog or YouTube channel learn more about your business.

Set up a Few Email Accounts

One of the biggest challenges most entrepreneurs have is they have one email for everything. However, as you grow you want to separate emails, based upon task. While you can have emails forward to one catchall email, you can eventually use the different email addresses to delegate tasks to assistants.

Additionally, it is recommended that you have a spam account to protect your email. I use Gmail, because I block unwanted emails through Unroll (see below).

Stop Email Chains

Do you hate those little email chains with a few words in each email. Again, the 4 Hour Workweek, is brilliant at reducing these time sucking emails. Send detailed emails with multiple options in order to reduce the number of email chains. One long email can take less time aggregately than 5-10 short emails.

Unroll

It is amazing how much one product can change your life. UnRoll is a Gmail product that allows you to roll up all email subscriptions into one daily email. Instead of getting emails throughout the day, you can choose which emails you want rolled up into a daily email.

For those who batch their email processes, as discussed above, then this is an ideal tool for you to batch all your emails at once. You get a daily email where you can pick and choose which emails are relevant to your needs.

However, I would not use this for personal communication with clients, but this is great for regular subscriptions and event reminders.

Email Genie

This Outlook plugin uses an algorithm to determine whether the information is important or not. Essentially, Email Genie sorts out the important emails for you to read first by highlighting the important ones, so you know which emails to read first.

The big challenge with this plugin is that it only works on Microsoft Outlook Exchange, which not everyone uses.

Using Email For Your Business

Email is a great tool to help you increase your productivity. However, you must manage it properly to build your business. Like they say, work in versus work on your business, email works in a similar vein.

Make sure that you use it to work on improving your business, and do not be overwhelmed by using it too often. The ideas discussed above will help you be more productive with your email usage.

Computer Photo via Shutterstock

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