Take a breath and start the race to reach inbox 0.

1. Sorting

First, start by sorting your emails as Maura Thomas, TedX Speaker, author (HBR, Entrepreneur, Huff. Post etc.) and founder of regainyourtime.com, suggests. This will make you skim through your mailing list easily and effectively. Most commonly, there will be an entire conversation of the same topic. All you need to do is sort emails by Subject, open only the very last one and read the whole story from bottom to the top. Then, what you can do is sorting emails by sender, too. That move will lead to a speedy massive deletion of advertisements, spams, coupons and any other “junk” email.

2. Deciding

While you skim through your mailbox, probably you will quickly grasp what you should do with each “unread” email. The ideal would be to deal with it, as soon as it arrives in your inbox, but -unless your job requires to respond immediately to mail sender- this happens rarely. Christiano Ferraro, management consultant and owner of christianoferraro.com, indicates that you should manage the email source, not the email itself. A quick respond at the time someone sends you an email leads to higher engagement and helps you be to the point of the email subject. It’s better not to open the email if you are not about to take action upon it, as it would cost you more time to mark it as unread.

3. Acting

Most of the emails we receive are orders or information about events and processes. What someone should do is work on it and take time to link or transform these emails into tasks and events or detach files and move them to file management system. Schedule your time, as Geraldine Markel, creator of managingyourmind.com and Frank Buck, author, blogger and owner of frankbuck.org, suggest, by moving emails to to-do-list or forward them to colleagues’ mailbox or task list immediately.

4. Making your life easier

There are also some tactics that will make your mailbox look organized like applying Tags, Filters and Archive emails. When an interesting article, blogpost or newsletter arrives in your Mailbox but you don’t have the time at that moment to check it, you can archive it and read it later. On top of that, Ian Lam, co-founder of cohesion.sg, and his team, have set their email client to automatically apply tags and categorize their inbox.

5. Falling in love with delete option

And now the best part of all, deleting! Don’t be afraid to put in your trash bin everything that just reserves a place without reason in your mailbox. As long as you have saved associated documents in your cloud storage, have scheduled your tasks and have planned your events, you can just delete the emails referring to them and save space in your mailbox. Mike McRitchie, strategist and owner of mikemcritchie.com, underlines that deleting emails will help you keep up with your inbox and not to miss key clients’ email. Also, Rahul Alim from customcreatives.com advise spend time to unsubscribe from unnecessary emails that have your email on their lists in order to avoid deleting same spam emails every day.

Good luck with Inbox 0!

Ready(?) Steady… Go!!!

The post Email Management: Actions to be Mailbox Champion appeared first on Comidor Low-code Automation Platform.

The post Strategies to be Mailbox Champion appeared first on Comidor Low-code Automation Platform.

Your email rules may seem good enough to manage your personal communication and pending issues. But this, does it really work in team or business level? At work, most of the times a new email means action. Something should be done by you, your team or in most complicated cases a cross-functional work should be done through collaboration by several business departments.

Let’s do baby steps. A customer asks you via email to do something, you do it and that’s it. However, the most of us we have a lot of things to do even at the same time. Therefore, we should prioritize and schedule our email/tasks in an easy and effective way. Obviously, a simple email service cannot help you on that.

Let’s make things a bit more complex. As team leader, you receive an email based on which you have to assign a task to a member of your team. So, you forward to him the initial email along with some guidance. He receives your message and asks for further information. You reply and then he sends you some drafts for approval. After a number of sent and received emails you reach the desired and final result. He uses this final outcome to do his job and then he has to send you some feedback. Although that the first email that may come from a customer cannot be avoided, the rest sent and received emails for internal communication purposes such as guidance, approval and feedback can be eliminated using a collaborative task management system. Such kind of software offers alternative ways of synchronous and asynchronous internal communication enabling you to enhance team collaboration and productivity.

Let’s be realistic. In the real business world, an email can be the trigger for a whole business process. For example, the sales department receives an order via email and has to communicate with the warehouse department for the availability of the product and the distribution department for the execution of the order. Furthermore, if there is no availability of the product the warehouse department should communicate with the production or/and supplies department and then give feedback to the sales department. In such cases, there is a great need for collaboration and coordination among the several responsible departments and imagine how many emails can be sent and received among the employees of the respective departments without using a collaborative Business Process Management tool to satisfy the customer’s inquiry. Of course, the benefits of using a collaborative Business Process Management tool is not only a cleaner inbox but also enhanced supervision by executives as well as greater engagement by employees considering their work as a part of the whole business effort.

Improving your business communication, you improve your business performance

The post Are you still using email? appeared first on Comidor Low-code Automation Platform.