Nowadays, it’s the norm for someone to have more than one email account, especially if they lead a busy life in a corporate office. You yourself may handle several at the same time. One may be for personal matters, and another may be exclusively for work. Even then, you might have multiple accounts for your professional affairs, like one that you use to answer on your own behalf and one that you use to represent your department or immediate supervisor.
As convenient as it may be to use multiple email accounts, doing so without a proper strategy may be bad for you. For one, you may be getting stressed about the flood of email notifications you regularly receive in a day. For another, you may be dedicating too much of your time to answering every single email. Before you know it, a huge chunk of your workday will have been lost to emails alone.
Think of managing your emails from multiple accounts as part of a larger strategy to make your workday more productive. Once you master this unique art, you’ll have both the time and the mental energy for better performance at other tasks. In line with this, we at Priority Management are offering some valuable tips for staying on top of multiple inboxes. Read on below for a preview of the email management and productivity tips that we offer in our workshops!
Consider Using a Desktop Email Client
Some may think it old-fashioned, but using a desktop email client like MS Outlook can actually increase your effectiveness at managing emails. Aside from being quite user-friendly and easy to navigate, an email client like MS Outlook can be configured with additional technologies to sync multiple accounts. This can streamline all your emails from separate inboxes, and thus make it easier to clock off on all email-related tasks for the day.
Designate a Purpose to Each Email Account
If designating particular purposes for each email account isn’t something you already do, now’s a good time to start. Draw the lines between emails you’re sending on your behalf versus those you’re sending for the rest of your team. If you’re involved in hiring or recruitment, use a separate email to receive applications from candidates as well as notices from HR. You can even set up a new account for the sole purpose of receiving passive email content, like subscriptions to industry newsletters. Doing this will help you in achieving the next step, which is to sort your emails by priority.
Learn to Prioritise One Email Account Over Another
It may be a knee-jerk response on your part to pay the same amount of attention to every email you receive. But depending on factors like your job designation and how busy the week is, your inboxes can accumulate hundreds of emails in a single day. It’s just not feasible to allot the same amount of mental bandwidth to each one, and frankly, that shouldn’t be the approach you take.
It’s much more practical to sort your inboxes by priority. For example, you can promise to check your main account every day, but check the accounts with less time-sensitive emails every other day. Commit to putting the actionable emails—i.e. the ones that demand an immediate response—over all the other ones. Set aside a time in the week, like every Friday, to check on your project-specific email accounts. It’s also good to decide which emails are worth checking on your mobile phone versus the ones that can be relegated to your desktop.
Use Filters and Folders for Each Account
Next, make it as easy as possible to find emails in each account by assigning them to particular categories. You can use the filtering feature in your email to pre-filter all messages with particular keywords, or you can manually sort them into folders. The best system depends on you, but it’s good to have one so that you can fully organise all emails from separate inboxes.
Choose Which Emails to Receive Notifications From
Lastly, remember that email notifications alone can occupy a lot of your brain space. It’s neither practical nor healthy to drop everything you’re doing to account for every single notification. That said, ask yourself: which email alerts are actually worth disturbing your peace when you’re at a meeting, or when you’re on your way home from work? It would be a good decision to switch off notifications for certain inboxes, and only leave notifications on for the emails you’ll need to respond to in real time.
Use These Tips to Maximise the Time You Spend on Multiple Email Accounts
Interested in knowing the particulars of smart and productive email management? Want to learn email skills that are invaluable to any industry? If so, we invite you to check out Priority Management’s online course on MS Outlook for company managers, sales executives, administrators, and project leaders. Sign up and get the training you need from Priority Management!
Sign up and get the training you need from Priority Management!