Some great tips by guest poster Miles Hall…
It’s amazing how reliant on email correspondence so many businesses have become in the last 20 years. Chances are that your small business uses email to correspond with clients and perhaps even for interoffice communication-you may even use the same address for your business and personal emails. So you can understand, especially as your business grows, why email management and email productivity might be important to you. Let’s dig a little deeper.
The Snowball Effect
If you’re not at a stage where your email is overwhelming you yet, take preventative measure to make sure that you don’t get to there. If you are at that stage, don’t fret—we’ll address how to fix it later. Let it be said that even though your inbox might not take that much time to manage right now, as time goes on you could be looking at a real headache if you don’t start preventative maintenance soon.
Inbox (0)
A lot of professionals would recommend striving for an empty and organized inbox every time you sit down to look at your email. This doesn’t mean that you have to answer and respond to every message when you open your inbox. This means that you delete, file away, or respond to the message if it will only take a few minutes. Keep it organized so that you can revisit it later, and use less time sorting through your inbox to find that one specific email.
Decrease Distractions and Increase Productivity
In your quest for an empty inbox, you should not be checking every email the minute it comes in. Incoming emails can serve as distractions that will take you away from whatever it is that you were concentrating on before. The reality is that emails, even those marked urgent, can probably wait at least one to two hours to be read and responded to.
Try setting one or two times during the day to check your email (avoid checking it first thing in the morning, as that has been shown to decrease productivity), and actually turn off your inbox until those times. Every time you turn away from your work to check an email, think about how long it takes you to get back in the zone after you get back to work. That adds up. Decrease those distractions, and you will actually see a noticeable increase in productivity.
Try Alternatives to Email
If you are in an office where you and your employees use email as a primary mode of communication, try switching it up. If your employees need to make immediate contact with each other, or with clients try having them just use a phone. Leave a voice mail if needed. You might also try—and I say this cautiously—using an instant messaging system. Realize, however, that if abused, IMs might cause more distraction than they are worth.
Stay Efficient
Even if you are trying alternatives to email, there is almost no way that you will ever stop using email for communication—and I’m not saying you should, email is a great tool for communication. However, like most tools, if you wield email the wrong way you may end up hurting yourself in the end. Practice productive email techniques, such as keeping your emails short, only checking your emails once or twice a day, or even using certain apps that are out there, and you will run a productive small business.
Miles Hall loves writing about the business world. He contributes to businessbroker.net, and is primarily interested in businesses for sale.
