6 Time-Saving Tips for Email

Do you have days where it seems that all you’ve done is answer email? Even if you use my Ten Tools for Pruning Your Inbox and Email’s Five Golden Rules, email can eat up all your time.

Don’t despair. Here are six time-saving tips to add to your email-busting toolkit.

1. Use the reading pane to preview messages

Set up your email inbox with a preview pane so you can see messages without opening them. You can decide immediately to delete an email, open it, or answer it.

2. Create groups

If you often send the same message to your old college friends, tennis buddies, or book club members, you can create a group. Give the group a name, then add the email addresses of group members. To send a message to the entire group, just click on the group name, and the email addresses for all group members will appear in the “to” field.

3. Use the subject line for the message

Sometimes you can put the entire message in the subject line: Confirming Tuesday lunch 1 pm at Red Lobster. You’ll save time because you don’t have to write anything in the body of the message.

4. Keep your address book up-to-date

Add an address to your contact list when you get an email from a new person. In most email systems, you just click on the address book icon to do this. You won’t waste  time searching or sifting through old emails to find an address.

5. Use a signature (sig) file that includes your contact information

Use a sig file so that your contact information will automatically appear at the bottom of the email you are sending. You’ll never again have to type boilerplate like, You can reach me on my cellphone at 842-978-6401. You can set up multiple sig files, perhaps one that includes your cell phone number and another that gives only your office number, so you can control who can contact you via cell.

6. Turn off new mail bleep

Do you have a Pavlovian response to the new email bleep and feel compelled to open each new message when it arrives? Time management experts say this is inefficient. Each time you interrupt what you’re doing, you’ve broken your concentration. You can turn off the bleep. But maybe you don’t want to miss messages from your boss or spouse. Use the Rules (or other) feature of your email system to bleep only when you get mail from specific people.