Annoying Email: Tame It!!

Do you feel that Emails have started to annoy your employees? Well they actually can be instruments of distraction disguised as tools of productivity. “Technology is an addiction, if you cannot switch your Blackberry off, there is some serious problem” says Gayle Porter, famous management guru. It costs one important aspect of employee productivity that is ‘concentration’ that leads to around 2.1 hours of lost productivity every day. Surprised?

Extended Highlights:

Time is Money. Any doubt? Computer chip giant Intel analyzed that e-mail overload can cost almost $1 billion for low employee productivity.

Rescue Time, a time management developer firm describes that the intrusions are same. Typically an employee checks email 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times.

After effects can include anything from side tracking workers from their jobs, undermine their attention spans, increases stress, annoyance and decrease job satisfaction and creativity.

5 Tips to Taming Email:

Do you feel that it’s hard to concentrate? Just follow these 5 simple tricks to stay focused:

1.  Adjust Settings: Manage Email App:

Based on your email service client adjust your settings accordingly, for example Outlook can apply rules to incoming mails, sorting them into folders, prioritizing them based upon sender, or deleting them altogether. 

Likewise even Gmail has settings to sort your emails based upon whom you correspond with the most.

2.  Dig out – More Information:

Pay more attention to major senders. How to do that? Know more about your senders. Available is a program that trolls around the web for you and fills in on whoever sent the email. For Gmail there is an application called Rapportive, similarly for Outlook it is LinkedIn for Outlook.

3.  Smartphone – Can be a Filter:

Is your Smartphone linked to email account, and then you must end up reading messages twice. Incorporate AwayFind, it scans through your emails and finds and send a text when it finds an email that is important.

4.  Automate – Updates:

Stop processing contact information from the important mails that you receive especially customers, start using smart application like WriteThatName that works with Gmail, GoogleApps, Outlook and Lotus Notes that automatically drives that for you.

5.  Outsource – Mailbox management:

You can either outsource this program to your wife who can sort out programs so that you can focus on business or software’s like Sanebox can come to your rescue which adds certain layers of filtration to your email features.

Have you found email to be excessively intrusive, what have you done to focus more on your business. Share it with us, we are eager to hear!