With the growing prominence of technology and demands put on us from our business, family, and everything in between, time is becoming a precious commodity.
This is why I am always looking for ways to save time regardless of what I am doing- this includes the work I do online. There are plenty of things you can do online which will absolutely eat up your time if you let it. This could be looking for old friends and family on Facebook, checking out who is on Twitter, replying and writing emails, and so on.
This is the basis of a short series of articles where I will go over some online apps and sites you could begin using to help you become more efficient with your online time so that you have more time for other activities. I’ll begin with what is probably the biggest online time eater: email.
Email Time Limit
There are a couple of things you can do to limit the time spent on emailing. The first (and, in my opinion, best) would be to limit the time you spend dealing with email. This isn’t totally original if you have read Tim Ferriss’ excellent The 4-Hour Work Week. If you haven’t, in the book Tim discusses how he deals with email which is to limit it to a short amount of time twice a day. I find 15 minutes in the morning and evening to work just fine for me.
And don’t be tempted to use some online app which checks your email accounts and notifies you when new mail arrives. The whole purpose of doing this is to save you time- which you won’t do if you are checking your email every 5 minutes!
Create An Email Account For Junk Emails
Another email time saver is to create what I call a garbage account. This email account will solely be used for receiving newsletters, replies to forum postings, and any other email which is not directly related to you personally. By doing this, you will be isolating those emails which are not as important as your business or personal emails. This account should only be checked every two to three days at the most. This garbage account could be created using a free email service such as HotMail, Yahoo Mail, or Gmail.
Switch To Gmail
As I’ve talked about in this article on applications which save me time, Google’s Gmail is the email client to beat. From its intuitive user interface to the ability to apply labels you create to emails for archiving purposes to being able to access it from anywhere with internet access to so much more. Creating a Gmail account is free and only takes a couple of minutes to create. So do yourself a favor and try out Google’s Gmail service. You’ll be glad you did.
The Powerful Auto-Responser Email
My last piece of advice regarding email is also something else I learned from reading The 4-Hour Work Week and that is to create an auto-responder email which is sent out whenever someone emails your business and/or personal email account. The auto-responder email simply informs whoever emailed you that you will check your email account at such-and-such times and they can contact you by phone if they need to speak with you immediately or before you are scheduled to check your email. This might be seen as a bit extreme but if you lead a very hectic life or if it’s crucial you don’t waste anytime due to a pending deadline- then this will definitely come in handy!
These tips should help you reduce your time spent dealing with email. Do you have any tips or advice in regards to dealing with email? What tricks do you use to save yourself time emailing? Let me and everyone else know in the Comments section below. Thanks!