Reduce Your Emails by 24% in 4 Simple Steps and Gain an Hour a Day – Part 1
According to a report done by the Radicati Group on email statistics, we receive an average of 75 emails daily, 13 of those being junk email. We send an average of 35 emails each day, which gives us a whopping average of four hours on email duties daily.
If you are a service based professional, this means that half of your day is spent in your email inbox and only four hours are spent doing your genius work (assuming you work 8 hours). If you are looking to grow your business and make more money, the math doesn’t add up, does it?
I’m not going to bore you with the reasons why getting too much email can dramatically reduce your productivity because I assume you already know that. What I will do is share the four things you can do right after reading this post to reduce your email intake by 24%, which translates into an hour a day. This translates into a pretty good deal! What could you do with an extra hour today?
Unsubscribe from 6 lists. Preferably the lists that send you daily emails. If you are not reading the emails sent but are taking the time to delete, go ahead and open one and unsubscribe at the bottom of the email. This action will save you at least six emails a day. You can start by looking at the emails that come from stores or online clubs you hardly participate in.
Mark as spam. There are some emails you don’t have an option to unsubscribe from. In this case, mark them as spam (if they truly are) and let your email server do the trashing for you. Some email platforms will continue to send emails even after you ask to be removed. Please make sure they are truly spam, as there are consequences for sending unauthorized emails and you don’t want to get someone in trouble if you legitimately gave permission.
Don’t reply to all. When receiving an email sent to a group, unless specified, don’t reply to all. If you do, you will also receive the emails of all others replying to all. That chain of emails can go on forever. If you must, reply to the person who originated the email and leave it as that.
Blog posts don’t belong in your email. If you stumble upon a blog with really good content, please don’t subscribe to their blog with your email address. Instead, join their RSS feed and send your favorite blogs to a place like Google Reader, where you can go at your leisure and read on your schedule, not theirs.
Take five minutes and execute these four steps today. You will be 24% closer to taming the emails in your inbox once and for all.
Next week, I will share another four tips on how to reduce your emails by 24% by doing minor tweaks that don’t require a lot of time or effort but that will save you an hour a day and decrease the amount of emails coming your way.
I’m curious, what tactics have you used to decrease the amount of emails you receive? Share them in the comments section below.
Share and Enjoy
- [...] and Gain an Hour a Day – Part 2December 12, 2012• by Araceli Gonzalez • 0 CommentsIn my previous post, I shared four things you can do right away to reduce your emails by 24%. In Part 2, I’m giving [...]
Like you, I do a lot of unsubscribing; especially if the sender is someone I have never subscribed to... (There must be a lot of people grabbing email addresses from websites and such...) Another thing that has helped me a lot is including ALL my email addresses in my Outlook mailbox, so I don't have to hunt around for them. I also use Outlooks 'Rules' to handle mail I may want for reference, but don't want to hunt through. Now I just need to get better about trashing those at a later date... (Maybe time for administrative help. :) )
Congratulations for having a handle on your Outlook and knowing what your options are. Email providers have lots of features that help us reduce email and Outlook is really good at offering solutions. Admin help always comes in handy :)
I didn't most of these things last week. It does save lots of time. I do like my blogs to come in an email, but I have them come to a separate email that is just blogs.- As long as you have an effective system for your blogs and it works for you, that's all that matters. Thanks for sharing!
Great tips! I will be sharing the article with friends and followers. :)- Thanks Lisa!
