Tag: e-mail

Taming The Beast – Making E-mail Work For You – Part 1 of 3

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Modern Desktop

Forward

When I first began penning this article, I thought it would be a quick missive on the need for a change of perspective on e-mail, as well as some suggestions to make our use of this powerful tool more effective.  About half way through writing it, though, it became obvious that there was much more to be said. 

The result is this three-part series with a more in-depth discussion about the roots of the e-mail problem and the substantiation for the suggestions presented.  It is my hope that readers find some new insights into how we can remodel our relationship with e-mail and its sister technologies – texting and posting. 

In the end, these tools are here to stay and it is our choice about how we want to integrate them into our lives. Using e-mail productively can make very good use of our time – the only truly important non-renewal resource we have.

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QuickTip: Four Tips to Being More Responsive

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Responsiveness is different than responding. Responding is an acknowledgement like “Okay, I’ll get right on that.” Responsiveness is a substantive communication, such as, “I’ve reviewed the materials you sent me and I think we should go forward.” We spend much of our day responding to others, but it’s when we’re truly responsive that we’re being[…]

QuickTip: 4 Time Management Tips

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Time itself cannot be managed. It ticks inexorably forward. However, we can manage our behavior to make the most of the time we have. All behaviors employed to best utilize time should target one thing: sharpening focus. The more you focus on the task(s) at hand, the more productive you will be, which will also[…]

QuickTip: Saving E-mails As Files

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I just read a terrific post by the Time Managmenet Ninja titled 5 Swft Tips To Help Empty Your Inbox.  Each of these simple recommendations can make managing your e-mail easier.  I added one suggestion to the post and thought it worthy of posting here too! The suggestion was to save e-mails as files outside of[…]

QuickTip: Fixing The Pavlovian E-mail Twitch

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Email has reduced us to the level of salivating dogs.  Whether we are in the office, at home, or in the line at the grocery store, we are obsessed with checking our e-mail.  Ask yourself, when was the last time you went 20 minutes without checking your e-mail or without thinking about checking your e-mail[…]

Six Tips To Higher E-mail Productivity

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This is a short segment of a presentation I recently delivered on how to improve your e-mail productivity. The topics covered include: Turning off your new e-mail alerts. Batch processing your e-mail. Subject line naming conventions. One subject per e-mail. Reducing the use of Reply All. Drag & Drop functionality. I hope you find something[…]

Getting Outlook Under Control: Reducing The Size Of Your .PST File

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Microsoft Outlook is the modern-day DayTimer.  Almost everyone in the business world today uses it either in a standalone setting or as part of Microsoft Exchange.  Whether it’s managing e-mail, scheduling, tasks or all of the above, Outlook has become a ubiquitous part of our daily life. The Resulting Problem One of the downsides to[…]

What To Do With It All: Treating E-mail As Correspondence

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As a productivity consultant, I routinely hear, “But I just don’t know what to do with it all.”  This, of course, is in response to the vast volume of e-mail, texts and tweets people receive. As an example of how bad it’s getting, I recently met with a social networking maven who confessed to having[…]

Setup For Power Processing Your E-mail: Video And Narrative

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Processing e-mail effectively and efficiently is the greatest area of productivity improvement you can achieve today. Setting up your Microsoft Outlook e-mail client properly will quickly get you processing that never-ending stream of communication more efficiently.  The short video below walks you through the setup steps that will make your Inbox a power processing center.  Below the video panel[…]