Making the most of your time: Emails

In my previous post on de-cluttering your life and goal setting, I left out an important piece of the equation. This is admittedly a key piece, and one rule to live by: If you can do something in under two minutes, do it right away.

Many of us find it very difficult to once and for all heave that wretched habit of procrastination, especially as today's online world of instantaneous replies and ease of transmitting documents and data allows for us to meet deadlines down to the last second.

How many of us, for example, have a Gmail account chock-full of un-archived mails (i.e. unread count 1000+) and have left communication with our friends and family who are far away, or in my case across the world entirely, for months and months?

For this e-crastination, as I like to refer to it, it is really best to review personal emails only twice per day. For me, this means:

• Once before I go to bed - I use this time to label all of my incoming mails, delete any newsletters that aren't worth reading and flag anything for follow-up. Any mails that I can answer in a few sentences I will do at this time.
• Once in the morning, right when I wake up - since I am freshest at this time, I am also my most articulate and find it easier to pen those lengthy emails to friends and family who really deserve my attention and quality updates.

There are some really handy tips that I recommend for you Gmail users to help prevent being inundated with loads of JUNK in your inbox.

• Learn to love the "Archive" button - once you have followed up on an email to-do or long catch up letter to a good friend, nothing is more satisfying than clicking that "Archive" button and feeling that you have accomplished something! Gmail has a handy new feature called "Move to" which allows you to both label and archive your mails in one foul swoop.
• Colour coordinate your labels - this is my most favourite feature! Click into Google Labs and enable the multi-coloured label feature. I like to coordinate all of my Financials/Commerce Labels in Green, my Family, Friends, Trip Planning, Professional Organizations, etc. all in different colours for each. Using bold colours (ie bold background and white text) for the labels helps me to see each label clearly.
• Superstar it up - again, go into the Labs part of Gmail and enable your superstars. Create your own "system" - i.e. Red ! means that you must follow up within one day. Maybe a purple star means that you have to wait for a reply to respond. It doesn't matter, just make sure the colours make sense to you; we all have our own associations.
• Delete your spam, trash and update contacts once a week - Doing housekeeping once a week to key in new contacts, sort through your existing contacts to delete duplicates and getting rid of spam and trash once a week are essential to making the most of your time online. This is the perfect amount of time so that you can legitimately scan through spam and trash before permanently deleting any messages you actually needed.

By developing good habits that we can maintain on a daily and weekly basis with our incoming emails, we are able to focus on those emails that are a priority and leave those that need more attention for a time when we can really give our focus.

Of course, this raises the question, "what do I do with all of my old 1000000+++ emails in my inbox that I never sorted through before?"

The key here is to do a 7-day E-TOX! It is up to you to go through in any way that makes sense, but here are some possible tasks you can do each day to help clear out that ooooold e-clutter!

• Settle your most common labels - create labels and colour systems of your most commonly used labels and get them set - this will help give direction to the process if you can clear out a mass of old mails first.
• Unsubscribe once and for all to those newsletters! - go through as many newsletters that you can find that you don't want and go in and unsubscribe in the actual body of the newsletter (most reputable ones should have a link at the bottom). Then do a Gmail search and find all of those newsletters and just delete all of the ones you can find!
• Haven't labelled old messages but have read and responded to them? - do a keyword search for a person you typically email with. Then do a "select all" and a "move to" for these mails, one batch at a time.
• Have other Yahoo! and miscellaneous addresses? - if you haven't done so already, convert to one address. I recommend Gmail. You can now go into your settings and import your mails from other accounts and actually send using the same alias! This is an awesome new feature. Once you can get all of your contacts in Gmail, send out a brief email to all of your contacts letting them know what address to use. This will reduce the amount of mail coming in from your other miscellaneous accounts.

Whew, this turned into really a Part I of "Making the most of your time". I guess I will need to continue this series with more instalments in the future. Keep a look out!

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