Want to Know the Secret of Stress Free Email?

The average person recieves about 75 emails a day and spends 49 minutes managing those emails. Now, the problem is that we don’t get all those email all at the same time. We receive them spread throughout the day and we get them when we are the busiest.

So what is the secret for managing all of these emails and keeping your inbox at zero? Don’t answer your email!

Don’t Answer Email

If you don’t answer your email then you won’t get distracted from the task at hand. I’m not saying that you should never answer your email but don’t keep checking it every five minutes.

Like most of you, I used to have notifications sent to my iPhone, notifications on my computer and even carrier pigeons following me around. This is like having someone tapping on your shoulder at all hours of the day and expecting answers. Maybe not the thing about the pigeons, but you see where I am going with this.

I shut off all those notifications. Now I only check and respond to email between 9am and 11am. I like to do it in the morning because this gets it out of the way and then I am free to focus on what the day has in store for me. Pick a time that works best for you.

Check, Process, Move On

Most experts will tell you to only look at each email once. This means that you should not open an email and then leave it in your inbox.

I use Gmail so I have my own system to reach inbox zero. First, I open and read the email. If the email warrants a reply that I can answer immediately then I do that. I write out the response and then hit the “send and archive” (Google labs feature) button. The email is dealt with, out of my inbox and I am on to the next email.

If the email is something that I will need later or want for reference, I just star it and then archive it. Again, out of my inbox.

In the rare case that I can’t deal with the email right away, I tag it using a label in Gmail I have called “Follow Up”. I still archive this email but I also send myself a reminder to follow up. I then ignore my inbox until 9am the next day.

Set an Email Auto-Responder

There are people that I deal with that always want an immediate response. They’ll send me an email and an hour later they will send another email asking why I hadn’t responded to the first email.

The best way to head this off is to set up an email auto-responder. If you’re unfamiliar with auto-responders, they are an automatic reply to an email that lands in your inbox. In my auto-responder I let people know that I have received their email and the time I’ll respond. So far, so good. However, my mother didn’t like it too much but she forgave me, I hope.

In Gmail I set my auto-responder up using a canned response (also a labs feature). A canned response allows you to write up responses to emails that you get often and keep them for future use.

I then created a filter that gets applied to all incoming email as long as it doesn’t have words like noreply or new comment, etc. You can do this by adding OR (uppercase) between each excluded word and put phrases in quotes. This makes sure I don’t send my auto-reply to notification emails.

The filter sends a canned response and applies the label “Auto-Responded”. The label just lets me see which emails have received the auto-responder.

That’s It

However, if I have a few extra minutes and I am not busy then I might go through my inbox and try to clear it out a bit. This gives me a jump on the next day. This is part of being proactive instead of reactive.

Do you have any tips or tricks for managing emails? Post your suggestions in the comments.

If you liked what you just read then please send it to your friends on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere. Thanks!
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Image Credit: cc licensed flickr photo shared by DVS

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