If you are tired of wasting your precious time in your email inbox, there are small adjustments you can make to optimize email and be more productive.
Time is money and for that reason, ordering digital life is essential so as not to procrastinate before the hundreds of notifications that reach our digital devices, including instant messaging applications, social networks and, subject that concerns us today, the electronic mail, which today is still the communication tool most used by companies.
There are numerous studies that point to the great loss of time caused by the excessive or misuse of email throughout the working day: for example, an investigation reports that we spend 25 minutes each time we respond to a message, while another study shows that 80% of emails are a real waste of our valuable time.
We know that email is an essential tool, but we must learn to use it efficiently and decisively. In this line, a recent investigation by the online productivity training company Zarvana is very interesting, which suggests that it is possible to recover at least one hour a day by improving the use of electronic mail.
Matthew Plummer, the founder of the company, reveals that all you need to do is make five adjustments to the inbox of your email.
5 settings in your email tray to save time
1) Apply a “one-touch” rule to your inbox: “We lose 27 minutes a day rereading the emails that are in our inbox because we do not process them after reading them the first time,” Plummer warns. You should not swell your to-do list by rereading emails due to your lack of attention and concentration of your to-do list. The best thing to do is to delete or archive each email immediately after reading it, unless it contains relevant information that you should keep or have on hand.
2) Disable notifications and check the email every hour: On average, we check our email 15 times a day, so it is important to reduce this number of occasions so as not to become unproductive and lose the rhythm of daily tasks. Plummer recommends that if we are not able to restrict your query to once or twice a day, at least it is key to do it only once per hour, silencing the notifications. Thus, we will save about 13 minutes per day.
3) Use the search to find emails: Forget the folders. We have an average of 37 email folders. However, the search and the displacement are 9% faster than the use of them.
4) Use only two folders, and use shortcuts to move emails to them: You should not waste time physically moving emails between folders. For example, creating two calls File and Readings and using keyboard shortcuts to move messages to them can save you up to 11 minutes per day.
5) Automatically filter low-value emails: It is very likely that you will eliminate the vast majority of bulk emails, such as offers and newsletters without reading them. The average is to open 20%, to which each one is dedicated around 20 seconds. You should set up your inbox to automatically filter them into a folder called “Readings”, which will allow you to earn 8 minutes a day.
