sapience-bpo service management, employee time management software

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE

EMAIL MANAGEMENT

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Contents

Introduction | Who is this guide for?

Email Processing Routine

Organizing the email box

Email Writing – Getting it Right

Best Practices for Email Management

How Do Others Do It?

About Sapience

© Copyright 2016 Sapience Analytics www.artofworking.net [email protected]

Introduction Who is this guide for?

Many of us around the globe have been part of the generation where we enjoyed life before the Internet boom happened. In 1990s we hardly used emails and today, many of us would start feeling uneasy if we don’t check our emails for couple of hours. Undoubtedly, email has become the central mode of communication – personal as well as for work because email is convenient, it’s less intrusive than phone calls or face-to-face conversations and it’s fast. While extremely effective, emails can also drain productivity. The simple task of keeping up with the flood of emails can be extremely distracting and annoying.

An infographic by Payscale mentions that reading email alone sucks up 28 percent of the average workday; employees send and receive an average of 112 emails daily. That’s a lot of time considering the fact that for everyone, there are a lot of crucial items to handle and work to be done apart from checking and responding to emails.

This guide offers nuggets ofwisdom to those who

• Feel that email is their first priority

• Feel that they have been spending too much time on emails and therefore not able to concentrate on other important items

• Spend much time managing their emails such as searching past mail, sorting, or deleting old mails

Probably all of us feel one or more of the above things – if not all the time, but at least sometimes. So this guide is for all of us who wish to use email as their most powerful productivity tool.

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Email Processing Routine

According to a study by McKinsey & Company, knowledge workers spend 13 working hours each week on their email inbox. According to this study by Atlassian, the annual produc-tivity costs per employee are $1250 due to spam emails and $1800 due to unnecessary emails.

Set up specific times when you will process the emails – even though you wish to receive and read the emails on regular basis to be in the loop, you don’t need to process each email as soon as it arrives.

Turn off the cell phone notifications which can tempt you to check emails. The ‘ding’ on your cell phone notifying you that an email is wait-ing for your attention can be quite distracting. It typically takes 10-15 minutes to refocus on a task following an email interruption.

Establish a well-set routine for checking your emails. Don’t keep the Outlook app or browser tab always open. Set up specific times during the day when you will check emails for some-one it might work well to check emails for 10 minutes every hour whereas; someone else might be comfortable checking the emails only 4 times a day.

When you process your emails, limit the time. Once you know that you have only limited time, you will automatically prioritize.

Point to ponder

• Respond immediately if it takes less than two minutes • Delete it• Archive it• Mark it for later response• Generate an action

When you process the emails, decide one of the following

Here are some tips which can help you Better process the huge stack of emails

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Organizing the email box

Having thousands of emails in the Inbox can be quite overwhelming and also distracting. If you are someone who receives hundreds of messages every day, if you don’t take appropriate action on each email, within no time, your mailbox can fill up with millions of emails and it then it can become virtually impossible to go back to an important email.

Point to ponder Use technology for your benefit

Use MailTags or Taglocity for email tagging, use Google Desktop or Windows Desktop Search for faster desktop search or use SpeedFiler, Mail Act-On or MsgFiler as Filing Assistants

While there is not a single structure of mailbox which works for everyone, having folders and labels can make it easier to search for emails and keep all the relevant emails in one place.

Use the rules engine in your email client effectively. Automatic moving of the emails to specific folders based on the set rule can save you the valuable time of dragging and dropping

Here are some tips which can help You better organize your email box

Think about creating folders for your sent items too – you can have individual Sent Items folders for each client or project.

Here are some tips which can help You better organize your email box

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Undoubtedly, email writing is an art. Don’t let your email writing reflect the cluttered and unclear habits you, as a professional, are meant to avoid. As per a study by Atlassian, poorly written communication costs companies $2100-$4100 per employee as annual productivity costs!

Here are some of the best practices to Help ensure that your emails are read And answered with more at t ent ion

Choose the words in your email carefully – avoid ambiguity and misinterpretation. Being precise helps in avoiding confusion and thus avoids future emails seeking additional clarity.

When you receive an email with multiple questions, answer the questions inline - insert your responses inline, preferably in a different color. Preface your answer with your name in brackets. It will instantly improve the email readability.

Avoid sending large attach-ments unless it is absolutely necessary – especially to a large mailing list. Instead, upload the files and documents to the cloud, such as DropBox or MemoPal, and provide a link.

If you have some important information to share in email, put it in bold. Similarly, in an email which is addressed to several people, if there is an action for a certain person, highlight his/ her name.

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Point to ponder Follow BLUF -"Bottom Line Up Front

This means that add the question or action at the top instead of at the bottom. This ensures that the recipi-ents don't have to go through the whole email to get to the point.

Change your subject line when the thread goes off in a new direction.

Heard of the 5-sentence rule? Try and follow it. You will need only 73 seconds to write the reply.

Try to use active voice with verbs instead of passive voice – it sounds more personal and action oriented.


Use email templates for frequently used responses – you might end up saving 60 seconds per message.

Send fewer emails. Pick up the phone and talk when you can, phone calls are more e�cient.

Eliminate extra recipients, don’t copy everyone you know on emails to start an email tsunami.

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Make the email easily scan-able by using short sentences and short paragraphs


Instantly unsubscribe from junk email.

Unsubscribe from those newslet-ters and feeds which you don’t read regularly.

When you need to focus on some important task, close your email as well as phone email notifications.


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A quick list of some of the best practices For better email management


Consider using text expanders like PhraseExpress, Texter or AutoHot-Key, which will allow you to assign predefined keystrokes to complete words and phrases.

Don’t check your email first thing in the morning, make it second – after you have done your most important task in the morning.

Immediately delete the auto-matic email notifications from social networks - better yet, care-fully select the email notification settings for each social network you sign up for.

Use EOM (means “End of Mes-sage”) – it’s a powerful time-saving tool. You can insert “eom” at the end of an email subject line to indi-cate there’s nothing in the mes-sage. This will help in quickly con-veying the message without taking too much time of the recipient.

If there are certain messages that you send again and again (like confirmations or sign-off messages), instead of repeat-ing the task, reuse a sent mes-sage from the last email of that kind.

Let your colleagues know that you only answer emails during a certain time in the day – this way, they will call you or find some other way of communicating with you in case there is anything urgent which needs your atten-tion.


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How Do Others Do It?

Here is a sneak peek at how successful people handle email effectively

Arianna Hu�ngton, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Hu�ngton Post, suggests no email for at least a half an hour before going to sleep and no emails as soon as you wake up.

When overwhelmed with his inbox, Hootsuite CEO and Founder Holmes, declares “inbox bankruptcy" and deletes everything so that he can start fresh.

Wendy Clark, President of Sparkling Brands and Strategic Marketing for Coca-Cola North America, suggests not sending emails over the weekend even if you want to work on the weekends. According to her, a leader should let people enjoy their weekends.

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The book ‘Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better’ by Will Schwalbe and David Shipley, which includes the email habits of people like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos mentions that successful people write short emails.

Enjoy this book? Check out the other books, infographics and guides from Sapience at http://sapience.net/resource-center/. Have a look at our http://www.sapience.net/blog

“If you want to receive less email, send less email.”- suggests Jeff Weiner, CEO at LinkedIn

Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, has a team of four or five full-time email handlers (aka email ninjas).

Google’s Eric Schmidt suggests handling email in a ‘Last In First Out’ order - since older stuff often gets taken care of by itself.

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About Sapience Analytics (www.sapience.net)

Sapience is an innovative People Analytics solution. At an individual level, it empowers users to own their productivity and wellness through mindful work. At the enterprise level, managers and CxOs get accurate Workload and Capacity Utilization insights across every business dimension of interest, enabling them to align their talent pool to strategic needs. Sapience is helping over 100,000 users at 70+ enterprises across 10+ countries to move the needle on employee engagement, employee wellness, organization productivity and business profitability. Sapience also owns the Art of Working platform (www.ArtofWorking.net ), that brings together several of the world’s leading productivity experts and working professionals interested in improved personal effectiveness at work.

Gartner recently recognized Sapience as a Cool Vendor, and Sapience is the recipient of several industry awards for its innovative product and fast growth, including TiE50 (at TiEcon, Silicon Valley, California – 2014), Frost & Sullivan (Product Innovation – 2014), Dun & Bradstreet (Best Emerging India SME – 2013), NASSCOM (India’s Top 10 – 2013), IDG Channel World (50 Hot Global Companies – 2013).

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