Oli Gibson

This post is part of the Empty Inbox series

There is no easy way to rid yourself of email over night, but these six cheats come as close as possible.

The Template

If your email is anything like mine around 80% of it involves sending the same basic few responses over and over. This was probably my biggest email time drain, until I started to use this sneaky little trick.

Templates make it so easy to start a new email or a response based on an existing boiler plate document. I use Mailtemplate for Apple Mail and Entourage but you can also use drafts feature of all mail programs.

Templates are the ultimate go to for:

• Basic ‘thank you’ response
• Responses to frequently asked questions
• Responses to any other regular requests.

It’s nice to be polite and respond to people and even better when it’s a one click automated response.

The Auto-Responder

Reducing the amount of times you check your email each day can make you so much more productive. Thats obvious really. Set two times during the day to check your email, I use 12 noon, or just before lunch and again at 4pm. These times ensure you will have the most responses from the previously sent emails.

Before you can implement the twice daily routine for email you need to create an auto-responer to train all the people who contact you to do so in a more effective way. If this idea scares the hell out of you, especially if it’s your work email speak with your boss first and propose you trial this method for 3 days to see how it works out. Remember to point out that it’s very rare you would receive an email that needed instant attention and you are going to put an alternative way to contact you in an emergency on your auto-responder. Here’s an example of what your auto-response could look like.

Due to high workload, I am only checking and responding to email twice a day at 12pm GMT and 4pm GMT. If what you require is urgent and cannot wait until eith of those times you can contact me on 07797979787.

Thanks for your understanding for this move to be more efficient, It helps me be more productive and serve you better.

Sincerely,
Oli Gibson

Make the move and make your email checking more structured, you would be surprised how understanding most people are and how much of a difference it will make to you.

The ‘I Don’t Know’

Human nature seems to prevent people from being able to admit they don’t know the answer to something. As far as email’s concerned please just say you don’t know and defiantly don’t do the opposite – spending hours trying to seem smart.

Not knowing an answer to a question is fine and telling the sender gives them all the information needed to keep looking. “I don’t know, but here’s the links to a few people who might” can still win you all the praise you could want.

The Question

Ok so this isn’t the best way to deal with email, but it is effective, especially for that email thats been sitting in your inbox for a while. To get the ball in motion i just ask this simple question to the sender.

“Do you still need this?” Trust me this will be a question that saves you hours.

The Link

One of my pet email hates is when I get a question that could be easily be answered with a five second google search. In combination with a template wrapper a response like, “Here’s a link that might help you out…” is quick and easy. It also helps to educate the sender, hopefully subtly suggesting they should hit google next time rather than filling your inbox

The Delete Key

You know those emails that have been sitting in your inbox for weeks? Yeah thats right the ones growing mothballs. Are you ever going to respond to them? If its more than a week old, either answer it or hit delete NOW.

This may sound counter intuitive or feel ‘mean’ but then think why is it you’re still starring at that message rather than responding to it. How, in your mind, will this email become easier to answer? If you can’t work it out you need to move on to the point below.

Delete it, move on and never look back!

Email seems to be the biggest time drain faced by many busy people today. It seems to be such an issue that many great minds have already thrown their hats into the ring over and shared their secrets for dealing with the vast quantities of email many of us receive. Like many of you probably have I read these articles with much interest, I was desperate to reduce the amount of time email stole from my day but it seemed that none of the approaches or techniques I read about actually carried through to my day to day life. So I have decided to do what anyone who is frustrated with a situation should do. I am going to fix the problem and I am going to tell you how to do the same. It’s time I threw my hat in the ring.

We all agree that the seemingly never ending battle to keep the inbox empty is taking it’s toll, not just on our overall productivity but also simply taking hours from our life’s that we can never recover. However with a proper system in place to process our messages and convert them into actions we can reduce the amount of time email takes up in our day by up to 99%. I’m not kidding.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be sharing with you my system for email mastery and a few tips and tricks I have learnt along the way. There is no guarantee that it will work perfectly for you as we all have our different needs and challenges to face but I promise you that with a little creative adjustment you can apply anything that has worked for me to your own email woes.

I hope that this series can become your go to for ideas to deal with email and become more productive as a result. Actually, scratch that. I hope that this series can help you combat your email and improve your life!

All the Empty Inbox posts will appear here but you can also bookmark the Empty Inbox page for easier access to the series and any new posts.