How many times have you checked your inbox & seen an email that made you think, “Oh, that’s an easy email. I’ll respond to it later.”? Then before you know it, you’ve done that to about 20 or 30 emails & you feel completely overwhelmed! This use to be us until we found a new system & made a new set of rules for ourselves.
We use to have 20 or more file folders that we’d created to archive emails we needed to respond to & emails that we had already responded to. We had folders called “Clients” then folders within that folder for specific clients… it was a little ridiculous.It worked for about a week & then we got way behind because we were spending way too much time sorting the emails, & we were getting confused between the two of us.
We now have four file folders: “Inbox”, “Eugene”, “Heather”, & “BAM.” We also have allotted so much time in our day to check & reply to emails. When we first check our email, we check if we can reply with an easy “yes” or “no” answer. If we can, then we reply to it right away. If it will take a little longer to reply to, then we move it to either the “Eugene” (Eugene needs to reply) or “Heather” (Heather needs to reply) folder & reply to it when we have more time. Our automatic responder states that we will respond within three business days. That keeps us safe & allots us enough time to reply to emails, even if we’re out of the office or just didn’t have time to reply to our emails that day.
We at least read all of our new emails, so we don’t get behind & at least know what’s going on in our email world. We don’t read a new email every time it comes in though. We turn our sound notifications off & only check our email at certain times. If we read a new email every time it came in, then we’d fall behind in our work.
One very important rule we have learned from Michael Hyatt is that if we can do what is being requested in an email in less than two minutes, then we do it! We don’t leave easy emails in our inbox because that’s when we’d become overwhelmed. (Lesson well learned
) On top of that, once we’ve replied to our emails, we feel more accomplished & we don’t have them hanging over our heads all day.
Now you’re probably wondering what our “BAM” folder is, right? Once we’ve replied to an email, we file it to our “BAM, it’s done!” folder (we wanted a fun name.) Then, in the future if we need to pull up a specific email, we can do a search for it in the “BAM” folder. If we receive an email that we know we will never ever need, we delete it! Why keep it?
This is our email system & we wanted to share it with you. It may not be for everybody. You might need to develop your own system because every one works & thinks differently; but we hope this may have made things a little bit easier for you.
Do you have any tips on how you keep on top of your emails?