Is Email consuming your life?
This last week has been so busy with networking, I only caught up with my email today, as well as several other projects. The truth is that while I think email is a wonderful method of communication, it can also easily eat up a lot of time, which could otherwise be used more productively. There are times I occasionally dread opening up my email inbox, because I know there will probably be a lot of email and while I can get rid of a lot of it pretty quickly, there is always some that needs to be addressed at length.
So what do you do if email is consuming your life, if you find yourself spending more time than you want on email? I’ve found the following tips to be helpful when dealing with email that’s consuming your life.
- Create a Spam Email account: Use this account for your online purchases, as well as for setting up social networking profiles. All of the spam email that gets generated from shopping online or being involved in social networks can go to that email address. I check my spam email address once a day and it usually just consists of me scanning the email for anything I need to know and then deleting it. Takes a few minutes.
- Set aside specific times of day to check email: The temptation of keeping your internet browser up and running with access to your email can be overwhelming, especially if you are worried you’ll miss that important email that needs a quick response. The problem with that approach is that it puts you on someone else’s schedule. If you are feeling overwhelmed by email pick a time or two times during the day where you will check it and respond and then only check it at that time. For the rest of the time you can create an auto-message that tells people that you’re busy with business or some reason.
- Create specific email accounts for specific purposes: I mentioned the spam email account earlier, but it’s also useful to create multiple email accounts for different purposes. For example, I have one email account for family, another for friends, and another for my business. By partitioning my email accounts into specific groups, it’s much easier for me to manage my email time. Additionally by keeping separate accounts I’m able to also keep business information separate from personal information
Your email account shouldn’t run or control your life. By learning to manage you time on it as well as creating accounts for specific purposes you can spend more time focused on other activities and still keep in touch with the people you need to be in contact with.
Categories: boundaries, business
Tags: Is email consuming your life, managing your email, spam email account
