Archive for December 3rd, 2013

Manage Emails So They Don’t Manage You

The convenience of email can be both a blessing and a curse: never has it been so easy to keep in touch with so many people across the world. At the same time, most of us have inboxes that are creaking under the strain of their simply being too many messages to cope with.

And once email overload starts to take a grip, it’s tempting just to ignore it altogether.

Using email should be a pleasure and/or a convenience, not a chore, and the key to improving the quality of your inbox experience lies in email management. Whether you set up a system of your own or employ a selection of apps and extensions to do the job for you, getting an organized routine in place can make a world of difference to the way you use email. Here  are ways on how you can do it:

Take control

Emails can quickly swallow up a substantial part of the day, if you let them. It’s important that you dictate how much time you spend checking messages, rather than simply responding to the volume of messages that come in. Decide how often you’re going to spend managing email, and resist the temptation to keep checking in too regularly. If you’re going to look at your emails, deal with them at the same time.

How this works in practice will be different for everyone, both in and out of work. Email communications may be crucial to your job or a distracting annoyance. Whatever the scenario, it’s crucial that you’re calling the shots and setting the ground rules, rather than reactively organizing the rest of your day around the demands of your emails.

Software and apps

If you’re at your wit’s end with email overload, don’t despair: help is available. Whichever app you’re using to access your messages, whether on the web or the desktop, you should find anti-spam and filtering tools that can help you take charge. Consider filtering out messages from all but your most important contacts, for example, ready to be dealt with at a later stage.

There are also many extra add-ons, extensions and third-party applications that you can employ to manage your email. The majority of these tools take the stress and strain out of organizing your email for you, cutting out unwanted messages and protecting you against viruses and phishing attempts at the same time.

Enterprise management

For those managing a business, a more comprehensive enterprise management system is required. Again, there are many options to choose from, such as the solutions offered by Mimecast, covering security, archiving and migration from other services. Pick a cloud-based service and much of the hard work is done before the messages arrive on your local system, which means you can enjoy a more optimised email experience.

Any time you take in waiting to address the issue of managing your emails is going to compound the problem and make it more difficult to untangle yourself from the mess. Get help with email management and it can transform the way you deal with emails and your communications with the outside world.