It’s okay if you often feel overwhelmed by your email inbox. Odds are, the messages come in faster than you can respond to them. This is a challenge if you’re a leader and get a lot of messages from your team.
Before long, you start missing important messages because you’re overwhelmed.
In this edition of our ongoing email productivity series, you will learn an easy tip about how you can receive fewer messages in your email inbox from your team, while still receiving the important information you need.
Ken Okel’s Productivity at Work video series is designed to make you more effective on the job. Every week, you’ll learn a new, easy to understand tip that you can use right away.
What Productivity Questions Does This Video Answer?
- How can I manage my email inbox?
- How can I receive less email at work?
- How can I empty my email inbox?
- How can I change my department’s email policy?
Video Transcript
When people don’t reply to your emails, there’s a good chance they’re overwhelmed. Are you one of those people who feel like you’re constantly drowning in email?
You look at your inbox and it’s filling up faster than you can empty it and before long, some messages are getting ignored. Others ones are really not replying to. And some you’ll just get around to when you have a chance but you just don’t know when.
This can create problems, especially for your productivity, because you might be missing some good stuff, some things that are time sensitive that you need to react to right away.
Here’s my suggestion: Talk to the members of your team and see if the can embrace a different way of thinking about email.
Now there’s a good chance they’re sending you some messages that are more like updates. These are almost, nice to know, good for you to know, but not urgent.
For these messages that aren’t time sensitive, I encourage people, at the beginning of the day, to open up a message to you and start to populate that message, throughout the day, with these little updates.
Now in the past, each update would be a separate email. Your inbox blows up as a result of this.
If they have messages that are important or urgent for you to know, they send them like the would always send them. But by allowing a group message to go out with those things that aren’t urgent, not an emergency but just good for you to know, those messages can be seen and responded to at a later time.
It can make things more efficient. It can make you conserve your time, as well as your supervisor’s time. And let’s face it, when the inbox gets too full, a lot of things get missed.
Want to catch up on this productivity series from the start?
