Email management is probably one of the biggest headaches of most of the people. Cleaning up the inbox eats up most of the time with little left for productive work. Just like email communication is essential for your business, managing your email inbox efficiently is equally important. So, below I will share with you 7 useful tips and tricks for effective management of your email load at work.

1. E-mails are not urgent!

Do not take yourself to read and follow your e-mail the very second it hits your inbox. By no means it is that urgent. If there is a real emergency, then your client, colleague, friend or whoever the sender is, will call you up.

2. Are all these bulletins you sign really necessary?

Probably not! Many of them you might have signed out of courtesy and many of them may be quite old which you don’t need any more. So, spend some time walking through them and check out, whether you really need them. Keep the ones that you need and unsubscribe the rest.

3. Does your email alert distract you?

Have you set up an email alert on your mobile? If so, disable it. This is a distraction and makes you check your mail box in the middle of your work; and it takes some time to come back on track and follow up on what you were at.

4. Check your email at specific times

Checking your emails once or twice a day is enough; say in the morning and again later in the day. Do not take a break from your productive hours to read your emails. Rather save it for the end of the day when you are winding down. That’s because you can easily get distracted by reading the various topics and responding to them.

5. Use email filtering tools

Set up folders and filters so that your e-mail goes to the appropriate folder as soon as it arrives. Organize your emails and reading them now is a breeze. You can then decide which emails are important and urgent and which can be handled later on.

6. Create email templates

If you think you are responding to the same queries over and over again, create an e-mail template for the response. And whenever you need to send the same response, just change the recipient email, make some modifications wherever necessary and click on send. This will save you a lot of time.

7. Auto-archive regularly

If your email software comes with an auto-archive feature, make it a point to run it periodically, at least once a month, so your e-mail folders do not get too large. And do you really need to keep those emails that are more than 6 months old? If not, consider deleting them.

Just follow these simple tips and you will find yourself spending less time worrying about and checking e-mails and more time being productive!