Email is at the heart of our working day. It's simple, we exchange for just about everything:get information, organize a meeting, respond to an invitation, send documents, hear from the people we work with... In short, what was the basis a tool supposed to simplify our lives ends up taking up a lot of time. Here are 3 easy rules to apply to increase productivity!
It’s a laudable goal:having no unread mail in our mailbox gives us the feeling of a job well done. Except that... it's a wishful thinking since we receive emails all the time, nights and weekends included. In reality, we spend a lot of time opening emails as soon as they arrive and it's quite discouraging since it never stops. It is therefore better to read intelligently and treat the messages in order of priority:the "easy" questions can be answered immediately, while we keep "unread" the e-mails which require us more time (or for which we must carry out research). It also allows you not to miss an important message, which you would have opened quickly and then skipped. By dint of wanting to respond immediately to everything, you end up spending more time typing emails than actually working...
Productivity experts say it:we are much more efficient when we look at our emails less often but that is all we do. Clearly, we schedule times when our only activity is to manage the emails received. By the way, we deactivate the notifications which constantly appear on our screen and distract us. To start, we can say that we consult our messages at a fixed time, for 10 minutes, no more (to be adapted according to our frequency of reception of messages). It is also an opportunity to adopt new work habits, such as going directly (or by telephone) to ask a question for which an urgent answer is expected, rather than sending an email for this (and putting constantly updating our mailbox to hope that the said answer will arrive faster).
We don't always know it, but mailboxes offer interesting features to save time:we can, for example, establish rules so that messages from a particular person (our boss, at random?) go to a folder dedicated. This prevents messages from this person from being buried among less important emails. The option also works with one or more keywords. You can also create a signature to save time, but also email templates if you find yourself writing the same thing regularly. Most email clients also allow you to transform a message into a task, so that it remains clearly visible. We also do not hesitate to unsubscribe from mailing lists that do not interest us and to denounce certain messages as spam (this will prevent them from ending up in the middle of our important emails).
Let's get to work!
