Hi this is Cyril from Work Smarter Live Better. In this video I want to share a few advice to spend less time on email, less time on managing email.
I saw a survey recently about the amount of time that we’re spending on email, it’s actually quite scary. We are spending more and more time on email. I think in a manager-level, the survey was saying, the amount of time that managers are spending on emails is about two-and-a-half hours per day: by the time you read, you check, you respond, so it’s a huge amount of time.
So for a lot of people, it’s too much time that we’re spending. So I want to give you four simple ideas to reduce the time you spend on email.
The first one is you need to be absolutely ruthless with email. Think impact, think impact. What do I mean is, you look at any email and say “Oh, I could do a perfect answer in half an hour”, the question you need to ask yourself is what impact long term? Simple! What-impact-long term. If the answer is very little, don’t spend half an hour. Spend five minutes, do a quick answer. You’d rather spend the next 25 minutes doing something much more important, number one.
Number two, filter nice to read. What do I mean by filter nice to read? We received so many things that just for information to look at. Ask yourself is it a nice to read or is a must-read? Nice to read, either you delete, you don’t have time or you create a folder that you call nice to read and you just plug in there and the next time you have some time to read them, just go in it, it might never happen, who cares? The nice to read is actually a half way to the bin, if I’m really honest.
Third advice: think about some triage rules. Think about some rules, are there some email and you could say, any email coming from this person or this newsletter is automatically moved to this folder and you can create when you use outlook, you create specific rules and so you can triage some of the volume you have been receiving.
And my fourth advice is remove yourself from unnecessary mailing lists. As soon as you receive an email and you’re on a new mailing list and it’s not useful for you. If it’s useful, great! Read it. But if it’s not, go to the end look at unsubscribe and unsubscribe yourself.
This is this week Work Smarter Live Better tip. If you like this video, just click on the like. But also, I like to know “what’s your number one tip”. What’s your idea to reduce the time that you spend on email, just share with us. Just one little idea so it’s useful to share.
You have a lovely day. I’ll speak to you soon. Bye.
