What do you feel when you start your day by checking email and you receive dozens of messages in your inbox? Tired? frustrated or ready to read all of them?
If the question is dedicated for me, I will say I do not have enough energy to read all inboxes. I believe this feeling is occurred not only for me but also for many working people.
At the first time I work, I never manage my inbox. I feel that I shall reply all messages as soon as possible. Because I think they are important and urgent. So I do not have specific reason to postpone them.
Slowly but surely, I realize that what I do is ineffective and not efficient. Because I never can stop to receive email. Then as you can imagine, my full time working is fully dedicated for just replying and reading inbox.
I do not have much time for ‘deep work’. I cannot complete my daily task on time. As a result, I must do my assignments at home. If you have the same condition like me, this is the bad sign for our life balance.
Time Management
The first thing that we should realize is when the best time to read email. This is important for us to save our energy and focus not only on reading inbox.
If you spend a half your working time, let’s say four hours just for check and read email, it will be a big problem. Unexpectedly, you will feel under pressure for urgent and important task. Because your time to do is limited.
On the contrast if you have less time to read email, you will miss for urgent task. Because you just read quickly for every inbox without deep understanding. In addition, your inbox lead more message every day from a dozen, a hundred to a thousand.
From my experience so far, this is the common problem that every people face in the work life. To deal with this issue, we need to manage reading and replying email properly.
So, the question is what is the ideal time to check email? Let me share my experience what I did right now.
Basically I divide into three times to check, read and reply email. They are in the morning, in the afternoon after lunch and before go home.
This is the morning routine activity that I do to start working. It is around from 8 a.m to 9 a.m. I usually prioritize the received email at last night.
After that I close my email app then I will recheck after lunch. This is the second time for me to check my email inbox. I read and reply for every email that receive from 9 a.m to 12 p.m.
The last time I read email is prior to go back home. The reason is I just make sure there is no urgent task that I should complete by today. If there is no urgent task, I can postpone to reply on tomorrow morning.
In addition, each time I usually allocate an hour to do. But this is not exact time. We can still change the allocation depend on the workload and the number of received messages in the inbox.
Email Management
Another important thing besides time management is email management. What is it?
It is about how to prioritize which email that is needed to reply ASAP or we can do later. This is crucial since as human being we would like to response quickly. No matter it is high priority or not.
Is it wrong? No. I do not think it is wrong. It is normal. We want to be considered as the responsive people. So we will follow up every inbox one by one without prioritization.
However the problem is we spend much time for just replying email as I mention before. Therefore, the best way to do is to sort every receiving message.
How? For the first step, I usually give remark for every unread email by giving flagship. If you use microsoft outlook, you will be familiar about this.
Giving flagship will help us to notice which ones is just information and need our response. In case for information, we can remove this flagship. Because we do not need to do anything.
But for every email that need our reply, we can sort again and divide into two category. The first is high priority and the second less priority.
For high priority, I usually reply them in the morning. I allocate an hour to read and reply high priority email. While for less priority, I will reply after lunch or before leave.
The example for high priority is such as customer complaint, follow up product registration and important task. While the less priority is all monitoring activities.
Overall, managing inbox email is essential part for increase our productivity. If we can manage this, it will avoid us from burn out or exhausted energy earlier. So we can spend much time for important-urgent task.
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