Frog Fast Five - Tips to stay on top of your inbox

By Wynand Brand, Frog Recruitment, 29th August 2011

Nowadays, having a few hundred emails in your inbox awaiting action is not uncommon, but it's how we deal with it that makes a difference… Here are 5 top tips on how to stay on top of your email:

1. Deal with it quickly
Deal with e-mail as soon as it arrives. This doesn’t mean you have to reply straight away, but assign it to a ‘to-do’ list or delegate it. You could also mark it for follow up or delete it straight away. The key is not to let it sit in the back of your mind distracting you form the task at hand.

2. Do it in batches
Once you start – keep going.  Get ‘in the zone’ and clear a collection of e-mails at a time, not just a couple. Turn it into a block of work instead of small annoying task.

3. Schedule time for it
Decide how often you want to deal with it and schedule time to do it. This allows to you to keep a continual commitment to managing your e-mails.

4. Assign rules
Microsoft Outlook has the capability to assign ‘rules’, which means incoming e-mails automatically get filtered into folders. For example, most e-mails which CC you in is likely to be low priority, so you can filter all your CC’d e-mails to go in to a separate low priority folder.

5. Use other channels
Instead of sending e-mails back in forth over the course of days, solve your problem with phone call to sort out an issue, or walk over to a colleagues desk for a quick solution.