Are you wasting your life away reading emails?

What is the first thing you do when you get to work or maybe even before you get to the office? Some of you workaholics may even have a sneaky peak at your mail as soon as the alarm goes off in the morning.

We all have so many emails clogging up our day, current and past, spam and flagged. And if you check again in a few minutes, more will have magically appeared.

With this kind of an inbox, you could easily spend your entire day opening emails and responding to them. While email communication is vital in the workplace, it shouldn’t be prioritised over your actual job.

1. The difference between checking and processing

Checking your email means you open up your inbox and read the subject line of the new emails. Processing is different. When you process an email, you actually open it, read it, and make a decision about a response, a task you need to accomplish, how urgent it is, and how you will prioritize what you need to do because of it.

Feel free to check your emails occasionally but set aside a specific time of the day to actually process your mailbox. This will not only save time but keep you focused on your daily duties.

2. Processing means an empty inbox

Once you have processed your email, your inbox should be empty. Never let email sit – you’ll just have to re-open those messages and make a decision on them later. And they will be pushed further and further down on your list and be forgotten. If you are letting an email sit, it probably wasn’t very important anyway. So take action with every email, even if it is just to throw it in the virtual bin.

3. Delete and spam

It’s an obvious one, but don’t be a hoarder, if you do not really need the email, get it out of your inbox. And spam, of course, should be a no-brainer.

4. Unsubscribe

Of course you have subscribed to newsletters. At the time you thought they would be of benefit. Now they are filling up your inbox, and you are not opening them. If you’ve not opened a newsletter from a specific source in three months, then unsubscribing would be beneficial to your inbox. If there is no unsubscribe button, then just mark it as spam.

5. The email management tools to clear your inbox

If you are struggling to follow tips one-four, Hiverhq is a great piece of software that you can download and use alongside Gmail to save you hours a day.

You can take a tour on the site and get details of how you can use things such as collaborating with others through shared labels, creating emails, scheduling when emails are sent and creating templates for types of emails that you send regularly. If an email reminds you of a task that must be completed in the future, you can designate a date for that email to re-appear in your inbox as a reminder. You do not have to worry about remembering to pull it out of your archives.

Managing email is a big factor in overall productivity. Once procedures and processes to are in place and you’ve learnt to act on the emails as soon as they enter your inbox, you’ll feel much more productive and at ease.