Inbox Management – how to help win the battle

Hi, this is another episode of Smooth Sailing Online Support TV. I’m your host and Captain Lyndsay Phillips, sharing with you the choppy waters of fast paced business growth.

Today I’m going to be talking to you about an issue that we all have and we all face, that is emails and of course inbox management. We all know what it’s like to wake up Monday morning and see like two to three hundred emails in there.  It’s like, oh my god, how are we going to get through it? We do have a few tips for you today on to help manage that and mitigate a little bit of it.  These inbox management tips I definitely suggest to my clients. I use them, my team uses them so I’m going to share them with you today.

Inbox Management - Battling the Inbox Gmail

Inbox Management – Battling the Inbox

The first inbox management tip would be if you haven’t already, get a Gmail account. We all manage so many different emails. Whether we have different emails for our business or we’re managing other people’s emails. You just don’t want to be going to one C panel, one domain, Hotmail, looking in different places for different emails. It is just so much more efficient if you have them all pooling into Gmail, then sending out as in one central location.  It’s super helpful, definitely recommend it.

The second inbox management tip I would have is dealing with your notifications. We all get so many notifications through email in respects to social media, how many people are following us, new tweets, whatever it may be. Even like project management tools like Basecamp, Podio, and so forth giving us our emails to remind us of some tasks. Which is great but it can just overwhelm your inbox. If you’re like me, you’re just going to delete them anyways. What I do is schedule my time. Schedule some time to go into my social media accounts to engage, interact, check out the notifications and messages. Same with my Basecamp, I always schedule time every morning, at the end of the day, even in the middle of the day to check on my tasks and status of what’s going on. That will, turning off those notifications will help immensely.

The third inbox management tip I have for you is managing your subscriptions. Now if you’re like me there are so many great resources out there, so many good options, reports and so forth, newsletters that we subscribe to. We get so many of them though in our inbox. I know for me, I have in the past gone through and just deleted the same ones over and over again, everyday or every week. It just doesn’t make sense. Take that ten minutes, go through them all. Figure out which ones you use, which ones you don’t really care about anymore and unsubscribe. Now for the ones you do want, a really little extra tip here, is to use Get Pocket, what you can do … There’s other systems you can use as well. In essence, you’re clicking it to save it for a future time for you. Maybe you schedule once a week to kind of go into some of your resources, newsletters and so forth so it just doesn’t clutter the inbox.

The last inbox management tip I have for you today is Google Apps. Google has a lot of amazing apps and resources. One that they have for g-mail is called Boomerang. It is just like how it sounds.  What it does is if you have an email coming in that you know what, I don’t need to read this right now. I don’t need to take an action until later on this afternoon or maybe tomorrow, the end of the week.  You can actually hit a button and schedule it to kind of boomerang and come back to your inbox at that later time, which is awesome. The other thing that it does is schedule when some of your emails go out.  If you’re like me, from time to time, I do work until ten or eleven o’clock. One of the downfalls of working in a fast paced business too.  You just don’t want your clients and everyone else knowing that you’re working at ten or eleven o’clock at night or people that you know as well engaging with you that time. A really good trick is to use that Boomerang. Schedule your emails to go out between nine and ten on the next day on more reasonable hours. Another good trick for you.

That is another episode of great Smooth Sailing Business tips for you today. If you are managing or trying to get through the choppy waters of fast paced business growth in your business, I definitely recommend reaching out to myself and letting myself and my team support you in your business. We’ve got some great comprehensive support services for you.  Check me out at ssonlinesupport.com or you can email be direct at captain@ssonlinesupport.com. Until another episode next week on Smooth Sailing Online Support TV, again I’m your host and captain Lyndsay Phillips. I wish you a productive and profitable week.

May the winds always be at your back.

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