With all of the email Finance staffers receive on a daily basis, it’s easy to see how some people become so overwhelmed it starts to affect their more important tasks.
While it’s true that no single organization strategy is going to work for everyone, there are certain tips that can be co-opted and tweaked to make your life much less complicated (at least when it comes to handling your ever-expanding inbox).
Here are a few of those tactics:
- Don’t let simple responses wait. If responding will only take a few moments of your time, then do it right away. It doesn’t take long for those emails to pile up — and make answering them all seem impossible. Jumping on the easy messages as they come will go a long way toward preventing an overwhelming backlog in your inbox.
- You can never have enough folders. Even the most outdated email systems can do a decent amount of filing and sorting. So make the most of it. Email is much easier to tackle when it’s organized. One way: Setting up a number of different folders for all of your various messages and having your email system automatically have incoming messages go to those folders without you having to see it first. That way you can tackle each folder on its own.
- Set up a folder for emails from key people. You never want to miss any emails from certain people within your company (such as the CEO or other key execs). Minimize your chances of having a message fall through the cracks by setting up an email folder or filter specifically for those people — and checking it regularly.