Are you an email savvy person? One of the major obstacles in our productivity workflow is our constant focus on our email! Think about it. Most of us, spent considerable time in their life, checking their email box and try to cope with the tasks derived from that!
What you can do about it, though! Internet and email, today are basic tools of our work. Moreover, they are essential parts of our productivity systems!
Methods, Approaches & Tools
There have been proposed, many methodologies (as GTD, for instance), approaches, and productivity secrets, to cope with the over-information derived by the constant flow of email, today.
And, of course, there are protocols and tools to help you, tame your inbox more efficiently. There are tools as:
- ActiveInbox for Gmail,
- AwayFind,
- BatchedInbox,
- Boomerang For Gmail,
- Boxer,
- ClearContext,
- Drag,
- FollowUp.cc,
- FollowUpThen.com,
- Inbox by Google,
- Mailbox (no longer available),
- Mail2Cloud for Chrome (not longer available),
- News.me (not longer available),
- Productive Inbox,
- Rapportive,
- Sanebox,
- Snooze Your Email for Gmail™ (not longer available),
- Streak – CRM in your inbox,
- todoist,
- Unroll.Me.
to mention only a few!
What Does It Take To Be An Email Savvy Person?
All, of these approaches and tools, are all nice and wonderful, provided that, you:
- you are an organized person trying to reach higher productivity schemes,
- follow, constantly, a specific methodology or approach for the organization of the things you like to organize,
- use tools, templates, and techniques you handle best,
- have set aside, specific time slots for processing your email,
- have a methodology for capturing all the related tasks and things to be done,
- are disciplined at the tasks at hand,
- avoid (as possible!) the distractions,
- know your limits and boundaries!
The fact is, that email mastering is all about discipline! You can achieve to have an empty inbox or inbox zero by using various dispersed tips or you can train yourself in using similar approaches in the framework of a methodology!
In any case, you need to train or re-educate yourself, and change many, if not all, of the bad habits you may have about the email and its everyday handling!
For me you need to insert any email management technique you find useful or effective in a larger organization scheme, that would provide a total organization solution for your personal and professional life and eliminate the productivity “chokes” and bottlenecks from your workflow.
Furthermore, you going to need good resources to help you achieve and customize your ideal productivity scheme and more specifically your email workflow.
As far as email processing concerns, an excellent resource, that would help you cope with, manage effectively, tweak and render you an email savvy person is a paper called: 100 Email Tricks To Make You An Inbox Zero Superhero“, by Sanebox. It provides excellent tips and hacks that would help you organize and process better your inbox.
A second one comes from Lookeen, with the title: “Become an Email Expert with these 151 Tricks” provides several tips and hacks to master your e-mail workflow!
For some further tips, you can visit the email productivity page in Hello Focus site!