Each weekend on Saturday I will share ideas for your weekend project that will have the potential effect on your whole entrepreneurial life and your small business. This is the second-weekend project we make here and I want to share 4 steps to organize email inbox to increase productivity.
Today’s entrepreneurial life in large part is based on different communication channels and everyday correspondence with different persons as customers, employees, and partners. That’s your job as an entrepreneur.
A big part of this communication will be based on email.
But, how time will go on, your email inbox will continue to rise and a big fat inbox will means lower productivity for you as an entrepreneur. Many projects, answers, replies, and tasks will be based on your inbox. You need to organize your email inbox if you want to stay focused and improve your own productivity.
What can you do for you and your small business this weekend if you decide to use this weekend project?
Step #1: Analyze all your messages in your inbox
The first step is to start analyzing all your messages in your inbox and decide what can be simply deleted and what will need to be archived.
This is an important step in this weekend project. The idea behind this step is to delete everything that you will not need in the future and archive everything that you think you will need as a reference in the future. For example, if you find messages containing advertising materials are received from different companies and if you think you don’t want to buy such products and services simply delete all of them.
Step #2: Design different folders
The second step is designing different folders for archiving important messages to organize your email inbox.
You need to make different folders according to your needs where you will archive messages. These messages are those messages you think they will need in the future for the reference purpose. For example, I have an archive folder for applications that I bought in the past. So, there I can easily find the serial number if I need it in the future.
Step #3: Build an effective process to organize email inbox
The third step is to build an effective process that you will use when it comes to email processing tasks.
Clearly defined processes for email processing tasks will boost your entrepreneurial productivity. Such a process will define how you will process your messages in your email inbox. Also, when you will process them and what you will use. Additionally, the process will need to respond on what will be your next steps for each email. The main goal of this process will be to enable you always to have zero messages in your inbox.
Step #4: Always use your processes to organize email inbox
Always use the processes that you define in the previous step and improve them on the go.
The process that you will make this weekend will be useless if you don’t use it in your everyday job. Using these processes, you will easily find different possibilities for improvement. More improvements will mean a better process and better productivity for you as an entrepreneur.
If you implement this project, you will start feeling benefits immediately when you start your next work week after implementation. It’s worth spending 30 minutes to organize an email inbox and become a more productive entrepreneur.
