4 Easy Ways to Spend Less Time in Your Inbox – Guest Post by Hank Phalstaff

Here are some helpful thoughts by a guest poster… What d’you think?

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We’ve all heard advice on simplifying our email routine. From closing your email application while working to limiting the number of times you visit your inbox per day, there are a lot of good tips going around.

But for many of us, they don’t always work – at least not as well as we want them to.

The following productivity pointers should cut your email time by a few seconds to a few minutes each day. That may not sound like much, but more free seconds each day means more minutes each week. More minutes each week means more hours each month, and… well, you get the picture.

1. Ditch the enormous signature.

Email signatures have gotten out of hand.

What used to be a modest two or three lines at the end of a message has become pure and utter chaos. Now we use a giant block of text and images, complete with links to five different social media accounts, numbers for three different phones, your office address, and a big company logo (sometimes included as an attachment, which is really annoying).

Some people even include their email address in the signature line, which is redundant and insults the recipient’s intelligence.

If your employer requires these awful signatures, ok. But you should, at the very least, delete them from message replies when we’re already well into a conversation thread. Why will ditching long email signatures reduce your inbox time? Because reading through messages with several forwards and replies can take forever when you have to filter through signature after signature.

Simply sign your messages with your name, a phone number, and one or two other things. Anything more is simply gratuitous.

2. Trade attachments for cloud apps.

Assuming your contacts are amenable, there are several apps out there that make most simple email attachments obsolete. Google Drive, Dropbox, Box.com – all of these applications let you store documents in the cloud and share them with anybody you want.

Instead of sending people attachments that they have to download, just send them a link to a document’s location. Nobody will “lose” files this way, and you won’t have to dig through the annals of your inbox to find that important report ever again.

3. Turn off mobile devices when you’re at your desk.

Or at least turn off email notifications. Even with your inbox closed, your phone’s got that little light that blinks and lets you know there’s a message. This is no good because it means you’re going to check your email more often – even if you already closed it to work on something else!

If you’ve got to keep the phone on to receive calls, put it in a desk drawer so that the notification light isn’t visible.

4. Don’t use email like a CMS.

A big reason many professionals spend inordinate amounts of time with their email is because they use the inbox like a content management system (CMS). Email, however, exists for sending and receiving messages. It’s not efficient for storing documents and sending them through a workflow.

If you need a CMS, get a CMS. Sure, locating files, modifying them, and passing them to someone else is possible to do through email – it just takes forever.

By the same token, you shouldn’t use your inbox as a CRM or any other type of application for which there are more appropriate alternatives. The end result will always be the same: more time in your inbox and fewer important tasks completed according to schedule.

And that’s not what we want at all. In fact, it’s exactly what we’d like to avoid.

Hank Phalstaff writes about business applications, large file transfer solutions, and other topics that matter to digital professionals. He contributed this article on behalf of Attachmate.