The mistake most people make is that they underestimate the importance of building an email system.One way is to think of email as a series of steps.
1 - Access to email
2 - Party of letters
3 - Checking incoming mail
4 - Removal
5 - Execution
6 - Storage
1. ACCESS TO E-MAIL
The first step is to schedule what time you will check your email daily. Usually, checking email four times a day is enough for most people:
1. First thing in the morning. Most people start their work day by checking their email to make sure they haven't missed anything urgent.
2. Before lunch break. Lunch time is a perfectly natural pause in your business activities; to make this time more productive, you can check your email.
3. Mid afternoon. This is another natural pause when you need to take a break or are about to leave for a business meeting.
4. End of the working day. If you empty your inbox as much as possible before you leave workplace, then the next morning you will immediately go to view new messages. Making sure that there are no last-minute urgent matters that you left unattended, this guarantees a more relaxed evening for you and your colleagues.
For the majority of people best option The last thing that interferes with their workflow is to check email four times a day and allocate no more than 15 minutes for each "session" of email.
2. PARTY OF LETTERS
It is important to understand that you process email four times a day. This does not mean that you must immediately respond to all messages that require a response, or write all the emails that you planned to send within 15 minutes. You must accept the fact that your inbox is nothing more than a batch of letters waiting to be sorted out.
3. CHECKING INCOMING CORRESPONDENCE
The next step is to check all messages, which does not mean that you have to read every one. Often, a decision about an email can be made based on its subject or the first few lines. A significant part of our correspondence consists of mailing lists and newsletters. If you are an industry analyst, perhaps a newsletter -
the most important document for you and you study it carefully every day. However, for others, this is not the case, and it is possible to quickly determine whether this newsletter is important or useful to us. Not all e-mails require a response: these are, for example, those letters where you are listed in the copy, or the subject of the message implies that you just need to read this information.
4. DELETE
If your main goal is to empty your inbox, one of the most simple ways to achieve this - delete messages. If, after reading the newsletter, you come to the conclusion that this information is useless to you, unsubscribe from this newsletter. You won't regret it and you won't have to spend any more time processing it. Delete all messages that do not require further action from you.
If you suddenly find yourself deleting all messages coming from a particular address, think about why this is happening.
5. PERFORMANCE
Just like when working with paper documents, it is desirable that you do not return to the letters you have read again.
If it only takes you a few minutes to reply to or forward a message, do it right away. You should respond as soon as possible to messages that confirm or set a meeting time, request information about your contacts, contain some questions or requests, unless, of course, this will take you a lot of time.
If you understand that you need additional information, the involvement of other people or time to think, then you will not be able to answer such a letter right away. You will need to take some action later: perhaps decide whether you really should respond to this letter and do something. If not, you can send an email right away. the right person. Before you delegate a task, it may take some time to figure out who
must be a responsible person. If the letter requires you to take action, save only the significant part of the information, and delete the letter itself. Keep your inbox free of such messages, and necessary information store, for example, in a system to track work on your projects, in a calendar or scheduling system, to make sure you get it done. That's what execution is all about - the assurance that whatever needs to be done will be done.
6. STORAGE
If an e-mail cannot be deleted (or reacted to and then deleted), it becomes necessary to save it.
The primary reason you may need this is if you need to refer to this document in the future (for example, it is information about something, decision, instruction, progress report, etc.). If suddenly you do not have a document to which you can refer, this will have adverse consequences for you.
No only right way storage of electronic messages. You must come up with a system that works for you personally.
One option is a subfolder system in your inbox. You can sort the subfolders by topic, category, client, or project, depending on what kind of messages you usually receive. Many people create a separate folder called “Processed Letters” where they put all the messages they have checked and messages that require further action.
Whichever email storage system you choose, remember that the only place you shouldn't store it is in your inbox. Remember also that working with e-mail should not take you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Keeping your email inbox organized at a predetermined time will save you hours a week, reduce the stress you feel about missing something, and increase your efficiency in dealing with what really matters. This simple principles that are easy to remember.
Men in modern world more and more time is spent on the Internet - looking for and finding work, reading the news, communicating on social networks, checking the weather, buying, selling, earning money, saving, making friends, watching movies, listening to music, and often just lounging around. Today it is difficult to find a person who does not know what search system, online mode, ICQ, blogs, how to use e-mail. But they still exist, and this text is intended for them.
In the usual sense, mail is the exchange of letters and parcels. So far, the power of human thought has not reached the level to send parcels through e-mail, but perhaps this will come true in the near future. Despite this, e-mail has many advantages.
1. In an email, you can send not only messages in the form of text, but also attach files to the letter: tables, photos, drawings, videos, presentations, and so on. Letters can be deleted, forwarded to other people, stored, filtered.
2. E-mail allows you to deliver correspondence (information) instantly, saving a lot of time and effort.
3. There is no need to go to the post office, because you can use e-mail without leaving your home, if you have the Internet and a computer.
4. Profitability - there is no need to pay for each letter, regardless of the amount of information in it. It is enough that the Internet service is paid to the provider in a timely manner.
5. Efficiency - you can check your mail and answer a letter even with mobile phone with Internet access.
So, let's answer the question: "How to use e-mail"?
First you need to go to the site of a certain search or mail system, for example, "Yandex", "Google", "Rambler", "Mail.ru" and so on.
Let's try using an example to start mail on Google. At the top of the site, find and click "Mail", a new window will appear to enter the mail and your account. Since you don't have a Google mail yet, press the red button in the upper right corner - "Create an account". Next, personal data is filled in - first name, last name, username, password, gender, date of birth, mobile phone, alternate mail address. create it yourself, it must be unique (if there is already a user with such a login, the system will warn you and ask you to enter a different name), consist of Latin letters, the length of the name is from 6 to 30 characters. Keep in mind that if you are going to conduct business correspondence via e-mail, then you should come up with and choose more discreet logins.
Next, you need to enter a password for the mail. It should be sufficiently reliable, preferably containing uppercase and symbols and numbers, and at least 8 characters long. Enter the password again to confirm it.
Your date of birth must be entered on this site in order to be able to access materials appropriate to your age. The fact is that a Google account allows you to have access to services such as Gmail (mail), YouTube (video portal) and Google+ (social network). You can set your account so that no one sees your age.
Gender, as well as mobile phone number is filled in at the discretion of the user.
To register mail, it remains only to prove that you are a real person (and not a robot), and enter the indicated Latin letters on the keyboard. If the signs are difficult to read, you can click on the "Audio" sign, the system will dictate them to you. If you do not want to do this, please provide your mobile phone number. A confirmation code will be sent to your phone in the form of SMS, you will need to enter it in the "Confirm account" field.
So, you have your own e-mail box, you can send and receive letters. How to write a letter? We find the "Write a letter" button, in the window that appears in the "To" field, write the recipient's address. If you want someone else to receive a copy of the letter, enter another email address in the "Copy" field. The "Subject" field can be left blank, but if you specify the subject and essence of the letter, it will be more convenient for the recipient. You can write text in the letter, format it, use the "Attach" button or the "Paperclip" icon to attach files, insert links, photos, pictures, save a draft of the letter. You can check the spelling before clicking the submit button. If you want to know exactly whether the addressee received and read it, check the box "Notify of read".
It's easier to read received emails - you just need to click on a new email (usually in bold). If you no longer want to receive emails from a certain author, you can mark one of them as spam. Further, all letters from this address will be automatically sent to the Spam folder. So, now you have an idea of how to use e-mail, you can correspond with business partners and friends, register on social networks, make purchases over the Internet and much, much more.
The Internet offers so many interesting things today, and we try not to lose information - we subscribe to various mailing lists, correspond with friends and make new acquaintances, use mail in business correspondence.
How to properly organize your e-mail? This question worries many.
There are rules in business correspondence using e-mail. During its use, some developments appeared on the rules of work and with e-mail. This became necessary in order to keep abreast of events, not to lose incoming information and to respond promptly to it. I think that knowing how to work with your e-mail will be useful to many.
How to organize the work of e-mail?
♦ Check your mail at the right time
E-mail is usually not the transmission of urgent information, it is used for non-urgent matters.
There are telephones for urgent information, and in the office her can be delivered in person. Therefore, if it is not agreed in advance that you will now receive an important letter in the mail, then do not check your mail constantly. Just close the program on the computer for the duration of the main work, so that you do not see constantly incoming letters in the browser tab or in the pop-up window. It will not distract from important matters.
And, oddly enough, the mail will be sorted out in a shorter period of time, because we will deal with it purposefully, allocating special time in the morning and evening, and possibly only once a day. It depends on the circumstances and type of your activity.
All this, of course, does not apply to those whose job it is to answer e-mails, for example, in the helpdesk.
♦ Empty your inbox every evening
The Inbox folder is the place where all the incoming information is collected, which you need to learn how to sort quickly.
In order to sort letters by subject, we need additionallycreate some important folders. For example, "Reply", "Personal", "Work", "Interesting", "Important" and "Personal".
Create subfolders for each folder. The "Personals" folder may contain correspondence with people important to you. For example, in this folder we create a subfolder "Ivanov I.I." and stipulate a rule (filter) in the mailbox that all letters from Ivanov I.I. will immediately be sent to this folder. You don’t have to worry that you will miss this letter, because in the menu next to the folder name an icon will be displayed that there is an unread letter in this folder.
This is what we do with all the letters that are important to us.
♦ We clean mail from spam
When sorting letters, it is necessary to mark unwanted messages and those that you did not subscribe to as spam.
The mail program has a spam filter feature. She is able to remember such letters and when sent again from this author, the letter will immediately go to the spam folder.
If you have not cleared this folder yourself, then after 30 days all emails are automatically deleted from the spam folder and you do not need to worry about it.
Never reply to unsolicited emails because scammers can use your email.
By following the rules for working with e-mail, your working day will be more efficient - you can spend less time sorting, answering and writing letters. Here are some specific tips:
E-mail rules
- Set a specific time to work with e-mail. Turn off your mailbox when you're done.
- Explore the features and settings of the mailbox. This will help you quickly navigate when working with letters.
- Use your inbox as a place to gather information to sort through. At the same time, use labels to mark letters. Every evening this folder should be empty.
- Set up filters in your mailbox to sort important emails into subject folders
- Periodically clean (unsubscribe) the mailing list from those that are not interesting and not relevant. To do this, set a schedule on the calendar. For example, once a quarter. The more often you do this, the less time this cleaning will take.
- Sort emails in your inbox daily and respond to emails as soon as possible.
- Prepare pre-made templates for responding to letters. Include a greeting and signature template in your responses. This will save a lot of time when writing responses to emails.
- Try to be as short as possible. Attach additional information to the letter as a separate file.
- Always check the files attached to e-mails with an antivirus program.
- Follow the rule: "one letter - one topic." This makes it easier for the recipient to work with letters.
- If you from different people the same question comes up, it makes sense to answer publicly on your blog or website and give a link to this article in a letter. So you save time writing an answer and give full information interested persons.
- Remember the rule: the less you write, the less letters you get.
- Keep an archive of sent emails.
- Do not provide the password for the account where your mail is located to third parties.
- Use the Letter Properties feature to find out Additional information about the letter. To do this, click on the right mouse button in the read mode of the letter.
Whether or not you use these rules is up to you. But when organizing work with a mailbox, you need to remember that we should manage the correspondence, and not she us. Email is supposed to make our lives easier, not busier.
For the past few years, one of my most effective tools has been email. I note that this tool will be effective only when you learn how to manage it, and not let things take their course. I wrote a little earlier.
To begin with, we must clearly understand why we need email. Wikipedia suggests: for receiving, sending and forwarding email messages. The purpose of email is to make people's lives and work efficient. But in reality, not everything is so simple.
According to statistics, on average, the number of messages received by a person is more than 100 letters per day. This is a huge number. And it continues to grow, which leads to the fact that a person is no longer able to qualitatively process the information received due to lack of time.
It is this question of how to work with e-mail that worries many people. An overabundance of unchecked mail leads to stress and lowers productivity.
You were also in similar situation? Then this article is for you.
E-mail rules
The most effective and organized people independently build their own system of working with mail, based on their own experience, by trial and error.
If there are more or less common rules for business correspondence in an email, then with regard to managing your work with email, everything is a little more complicated. It depends on many factors, such as the field of activity, the degree of business activity and organization of a person, lifestyle and doing business, and so on.
Working with e-mail
So, let's begin. I need my effective e-mail rules to:
- Increase your efficiency
- Always be an obligatory and correct person for your correspondents.
- Always know how I reworked mail.
- Never lose incoming emails.
There are several principles for working with mail:
1. Use your inbox as a checklist and leave unprocessed messages in it.
2. Create separate folders for each project, category. This will help you quickly find the information you need.
3. Actively use the use of labels, color marks. This will make the sorting of letters noticeable for visual perception.
4. Thoroughly study and know the settings system in the mail account. This will help you manage it effectively.
5. Determine the time you are willing to devote to working with mail. For example, 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. And not a minute more.
6. If working conditions allow, disable the pop-up notifications about new letters. This way you will be less distracted.
7. Unsubscribe from irrelevant mailings.
8. during the day.
9. Save all sent emails. There is always something useful. Today I found a scan of my passport this way.
10. Be able to identify the signs by which you will process and sort mail.
Email technology
If we remember the first rule well, then our goal when parsing mail is to leave as few letters as possible in the inbox.
At the same time, the second task, no less important, is to sort all the letters into categories, specifics and importance. You can leave emails in your inbox that require you to respond immediately or quickly. They can also be immediately marked with colored marks or labels. I'll add that I mainly use the G-mail mail program, having a few other accounts in other mail programs.
How others work with email
Once I watched a video about working with a mailbox, where the author showed how he famously dealt with two hundred letters in a few minutes. Naturally, the enticing headline made me see how this can be done, since I did not know an effective answer to this question. It turned out that its principle of operation is based on deleting letters and leaving important and necessary ones in the Inbox. Surprised! So anyone can. I quickly came to the conclusion: this technique does not suit me.
We cut live
Agree that the lion's share of letters are the mailing lists we need and a storehouse of information. And when we are advised to unsubscribe from many of them, be honest, who raised their hand to unsubscribe from their choice? Since we chose it, it means that we need it and it is important. However, I will also advise you to unsubscribe from those mailing lists that are less relevant to you today. It's like cleaning your wardrobe - and it's a pity to throw it away, and I haven't worn it for a long time ...
Reassure yourself that as a last resort you know where this newsletter is located, and if necessary, you can always look there for information or subscribe again.
Take your folder names seriously. Here it is impossible to give advice for everyone at once - a lot depends on the individuality of the person. I know that many people prefer to place any mailings, letters related to sales topics in a folder called Sales. This option also works. My folders can have the name and surname of the person from whom the letters come, including on the topic of sales, and on the name of mailing lists. That is, the topic Sales in my mail corresponds to not one folder, but several. I am well versed in them. The author's personal brand is important to me.
Structure outgoing emails
Structuring outgoing emails is also easy. Give them labels or tags so they can be found in right moment. Create folders for the most important ones and use move. For example, during my work on several projects at the same time, I had to send similar letters to clients and conduct correspondence. Having created a folder with the name of the project, after sending the letter, I moved the necessary letters to it.
During the initial parsing of mail, I try to skim through the letters and determine in which category they should be moved. I also divide them according to the degree of importance and urgency: urgent - unimportant; urgent - important; non-urgent - unimportant: non-urgent - important. I leave important letters that require a response from me or some work today in the Inbox folder, after completing the work I move it to the appropriate folder.
If I understand that the subject of the letter will be relevant for me in the near future, then I allow myself to move the message to the unread folder. IN right time hands will definitely reach him.
I draw your attention to the fact that all of the above methods were born not in one day, and not even in two. Already today, many companies are thinking about the development and implementation of rules for working with e-mail. Effective management and organization of time will become necessary qualities at work for all companies.
If you don't manage your mail, it will soon manage you, which will lead to unnecessary stress. Develop your email rules.
With the use and application of these rules, you will become efficient in your business life. Friends, good luck in your business! Be efficient, and don't forget. And as always, I appreciate your comments and retweets and your personal advice.
