Email Etiquette: Auto-Responder

Auto-Responder

If you only check your emails once a day, turn on your auto-responder and include the information on your email habits, when you will get back to them, and an alternate method to reach you if it’s important. There is nothing worse than not knowing why someone hasn’t responded to a time sensitive matter. It only takes a couple clicks of the mouse to set your auto-responder feature and it is so considerate!

These are just a few examples of email etiquette and there are a slew of others out there. Spell check is another that makes everyone's life so much easier.

What other examples do you have for email etiquette?

Happy Organizing!

Suzanne Babb

Email Etiquette: Sensitivity

Sensitivity

The same holds true with sensitivity levels of emails as it does with CYA. If an email you are sending sounds or reads peevish, try using different verbiage, include a smiley face, or just call the person on the phone. The precautions you take now will save you valuable time, energy and headaches later.

By the way, there isn’t a smiley face big enough to counter act some scenarios. Don’t fire, reprimand, or otherwise scold a co-worker via email. Talk about tacky!

Email Etiquette: CYA

CYA

We have all heard the expression of CYA, “Cover Your Ass”. Sometimes we put specific information in emails to cover our fannies or print it out and save the hard copy when it’s really important, but how about NOT sending an email because it could come back to bite you in the butt?

Regardless of whether it’s petty cattiness about a co-worker, sexual harassment, or an email that could be misconstrued as snippy, if you think there is even a remote chance that someone can use it against you, don’t send it. Call the person or have a face-to-face conversation with them, don’t email.

Of course, if the exact opposite is true and you need a paper trail, then definitely email!

Email Etiquette: Subject Lines

Subject Lines

Don’t you hate it when someone interrupts you or drastically changes the subject while you are talking? I know I can’t stand it. It’s beyond rude and the same can be said to irrelevant or non-existent subject lines in emails.

For instance, you are sending over the new pricing to a client how do you label it so he can quickly identify the importance of the email? Do you leave the subject line blank? Heck no! You put in the subject line 2008 Updated Pricing. You don’t just grab the email the client sent you with Meeting Request in the subject line and send the pricing to him. If you did that, he may never read it because he would assume it’s just something in regards to the meeting you already had and irrelevant.

Another scenario would be his inbox is completely overwhelming, he hasn’t had a chance to check emails, and after a couple of days he finally remembers that you sent him pricing. When he does a search for your email with something labeled pricing, he can’t find it. Do you really want to that to happen? Heck no! So take the few extra seconds it takes to create a new email with a relevant subject line.

Having great subject lines can also help streamline your processes and get faster feedback. Let’s take the pricing scenario again; you need to get the pricing approved by your supervisor before sending it to the client. Why not create a subject line that reads: “Needs Approval: Acme Client Pricing”? Your supervisor can visually see that he has an action required of him, he knows who it is for and what it is. This is a great way to save him time; you time, and get back to your client in a timely fashion.

Email Etiquette: ALL CAPS

Don’t put your elbows on the table, don’t talk with your mouth full, and don’t play with your food. These are the things you and your parents have been repeating for years. It is so important to have good etiquette in life and the same holds true with email.

We are going to cover some of the biggest email no-no’s, why it’s rude, and how you can correct some of your own unintentional bad habits.

ALL CAPS

One of the biggest email no-no’s is using ALL CAPS. ALL CAPS is the equivalent to screaming at someone in cyber space and who likes to be screamed at? However, using ALL CAPS to emphasize a word is fine, but to send an email with all capital letters is just plain rude.

Tips and Tricks to Keep My Inbox Clean

We just went through a lot of information on how to keep your inbox cleaned out and maintained. We determined your email organizing style, we talked about creating routines, and we even figured out some solutions to some of our biggest issues.

Now we are going to take one last final look at some of the quick ways you can maintain control! You don’t necessarily need to do all of the little suggestions, as a matter of fact there is such as a thing as being over organized. I want you to pick just a couple of things you can and will do to keep your inbox looking spic and span. Don’t over commit, we don’t want to set you up for failure so just pick your favorite tricks and write them down.

Tips and Tricks I Can Do

ü Create specific folders for emails

ü Create Rules for incoming emails

ü Clean out my inbox every evening

ü Clean by conversation once a week

ü Set up my Auto-Archive feature

ü Do & Delete

ü File away my emails as they come in

ü Set up different email addresses for different types of emails

ü Create a daily routine to deal with emails

Once you have your tips and tricks determined I want you to put them into your routine. Use your calendar if you need to and get into the habit now. What other solutions can you come up with to gain control of your inbox?

Tomorrow, we are on to Etiquette!

Happy Organizing!

Keeping the Inbox Clean: The Last Step

Regardless of which style best represents you, you need to make sure you remember the 5 important steps of maintaining a successful inbox.

1. Address what emails need action as they come in

2. Remove emails you do not need

3. File away other emails

4. Create Rules to keep your inbox tidy

5. Set up your routine

Now that your inbox is clean let’s do a couple of things to make sure it stays that way. We will have one step that will be completely automatic and you won’t have to do a damn thing, the other step will definitely take discipline on your part.

Let’s start with the easy step first, shall we?

We are going to set up a few rules for incoming emails into your inbox. An email Rule is a wonderful little feature that automatically sends an incoming email to a place you designate within your inbox. Right now all of your emails are going straight into your inbox as a default. However, we just finished creating folders for a lot of your emails.

Imagine if all of the pesky newsletters, meeting notes, sales reports, etc. automatically went into their respective folders. You wouldn’t have to worry about moving them, having them clog your inbox, and you can review them at your leisure. Creating Rules effectively can be one of the biggest allies you have when it comes to keeping your inbox clean. You can create Rules based on subject or sender and you can change or delete it at any time. If you are afraid you will miss an email from your boss because of the massive amounts of emails you receive in a day, make her a Rule. Every time she sends you an email it will go into her folder and it will be in bold with the number of unread emails. You will never have to worry about missing another email or dropping the ball on a project because you didn’t see the email.

Now that the easy part is set up, let’s move on to what YOU have to do. Creating a routine for your emails is essential to maintaining a tidy inbox. A routine is something you set up for yourself, that makes sense to you, and is easy for you to do on a regular basis.

For example; you could do something as simple as:

1. Address emails as they come in; act, move, or delete.

2. Before you leave for the day, clean out your inbox.

Regardless of your daily routine, you need to figure out what works best for you and you need to continue to do it every single day. Make it a daily goal to have your inbox completely cleaned out before you leave or only have what you need in your inbox. This way when you come back to work the next morning you are ready to start fresh. Very similar to cleaning up your desk before you go home for the night.

Keeping the Inbox Clean: Visual

Visual

For those of you who are more Visually inclined, you have the most options available to you. Are you going to color code with flags, categorize by topic or action type? What about folders?

A very successful way of organizing your inbox would be to utilize two out of the three solutions. You could create folders similar to the Logical organizing style and then use flags to organize your action emails.

You could also try using your inbox in an Inspirational format and implement categories and color coding as your solutions. The categories in this scenario would replace using folders.

Regardless of which style best represents you, you need to make sure you remember the 5 important steps of maintaining a successful inbox.

1. Address what emails need action as they come in

2. Remove emails you do not need

3. File away other emails

4. Create Rules to keep your inbox tidy

Keeping the Inbox Clean: Logical

Logical

For the Logical organizers, we need to start by finding homes for the emails that are left. So let’s determine what folders make sense to you and your business.

By Client

Project

Work

Personal

Department

Action Type

What else can you think of?

Once you have your folders created, go ahead and start filing emails away. Sometimes it is easier to file away large groups of emails by sender or by subject. So be sure and take advantage of the sorting feature built into your inbox. You may also want to take advantage of the “Rules” feature for some of your recurring emails, such as weekly reports.

Almost finished with the organizing style solutions for keeping your inbox clean. Tomorrow we wrap it up with the Inspirational Organizing Style!

Happy Organizing!

Suzanne Babb

Keeping the Inbox Clean: Inspirational

Inspirational

Look through the emails that are left in your new “Inbox September 08” folder. Anything that requires some sort of action on your part, I want you to move it back into your regular inbox. This does NOT mean that I want you replying to them right now. As a matter of fact, I don’t want any of you doing anything with the emails other than moving them around and sorting. No quick replies, no “oh it will only take a sec” excuses. Nada, nothing, zilch. You can go back and play when we are done.

Once you have all of your action needing emails in your Inbox, I want you to decide how you want to handle the other emails you have. Are you comfortable doing a “Do and Delete”? Or do you want to play it safe and keep the emails in the folder for a bit longer? I will leave that entirely up to you and your safety net.

Once you have finished transferring the emails back to your inbox, I want you to write down how many emails you have now!

=) Not too bad, is it? Tomorrow, we will help out all of you Logical Organizers!

Until then,

Happy Organizing!

Keeping the Inbox Clean

Now that you know your Organizing Style, putting together your plan of attack should be relatively easy. But before we get to the fun part of cleaning it out let’s see where you are at right now. How many emails do you have in your inbox at this very moment?

In this next series, we are going to give you some suggestions for how you can clean out that monstrous inbox of yours and MAINTAIN it! Regardless of what your email situation is, we all have things we love and hate about our inbox. Think about your current situation and I want you to write down what you absolutely hate about your inbox. Those are the things you want to concentrate on changing. As you find new solutions or ideas of your own, be sure and write them down.

I don’t know about you, but I distinctly remember that our Math book in high school had the answers to all of the odd numbered questions in the back of the book. I would be completely lying to you if I swore that I did NOT look at the answers, so let’s face it, I’m a cheater and like I did back in high school I am going to cheat again!

For right now we are going to cheat with our inbox. Sometimes it’s about shoving everything underneath your bed and tackling the nightmare when you are in a better frame of mind. So that is what we are going to do!

Go ahead and create a new folder in your inbox and label it, “Inbox September 08”. Next, move all of your emails into the new folder. Voila! Your inbox is clean and you are all done! KIDDING!

The good part about taking this step is you do get to start with a clean slate, however, it does not mean you don’t have to do something with all of those emails. The quickest way of getting rid of obsolete emails is to Archive. Archiving is wonderful in that you determine how far back you want to leave those old emails in your inbox. The standard time frame is about 90 days, but you can change it to reflect whatever makes you most comfortable. I personally have mine set to 30-days. If you haven’t already set up your Auto Archive feature, go ahead and do it. It will amaze you how many emails will magically disappear from your inbox.

I personally like sorting through all of my emails and deleting all of the crap. That means jokes, witty banter back and forth from my friends, updates from Plaxo, notifications from Facebook, etc. This is all senseless garbage. So I start by sorting my emails by the sender. I can quickly delete every email sent to me by Dan, eliminate all of the updates from social networking sites, and I have just deleted over 200 emails in the matter of moments. How amazing is that?!

The next part is a bit more time consuming, but just as liberating! A lot of email programs have an option of sorting by Conversation. What this does is actually put together email strings. So if you and a colleague have sent 10 emails back and forth on one email string, it will group all of those emails or Conversations together and you can delete all but the most current email. There is no need to keep 9 other emails when you have the entire conversation all in one email! With a simple click on Delete you have just further cleaned out your inbox.

Now that we have all had the wonderful pleasure of deleting all of the memory sucking emails, let’s go ahead and figure out what to do with the emails that are left.

Before we get started though, you need to remember what Organizing Style you are. Are you Visual, Logical or Inspirational? This is going to play a huge part on what steps you are going to need to take to clean out your inbox further.

Steps to Take

1. Create new folder – “Inbox Month Year”

2. Move all emails from inbox to temp folder

3. Auto Archive

4. Clean out the crap

5. Delete by conversation

If you are among the blessed Inspirational organizers, we are going to start with you since you will be the easiest. Stayed tuned to tomorrow's blog post to find out HOW to best keep your inbox clean.

Happy Organizing!

Suzanne

Email Organization: Inspirational

Inspirational: Do & Delete

For the Inspirational organizer you are definitely the kind of person who needs to feel motivated to work. If you are overwhelmed you can quickly shut down and just not feel in the mood to accomplish anything no matter how insignificant the task. That is why your email inbox needs to be a safe haven. The best way to make the most out of your email experience is to simply DELETE!

Delete

If you don’t need it…delete it! Why clog up your life with needless items?

Once you reply to an email delete the original. Every time you reply to an email it is automatically saved in your sent items. So don’t worry about losing it forever, you do have a simple back up. J

Of course, if you aren’t comfortable with the idea of deleting, you can always create a back up inbox. Instead of Doing and Deleting you can Do and Move. This way your inbox is not overwhelming you, you aren’t stressed about deleting and you only have to worry about one other folder and not a slew of them.

Just remember, having an empty inbox makes you happy and not overwhelmed! You also need to keep everything simple so don’t over complicate your inbox.

*******

Hopefully some of these suggestions will help you identify ways to make your email life a heck of a lot easier in the months to come. I am hoping to continue doing the series on Email Organization so be sure and give me your feedback on what is working and/or NOT working for you!

Until next time,

Happy Organizing!

Suzanne Babb

Email Organization: Visual

Visual: Coding Your Emails

The biggest threat a Visual Organizer has is out of sight out of mind! If this is you, then you are more likely to be a very Visual person. So keep that in mind when you are going through some of the organizing styles. The great part about being more visual is you have a wonderful world of color just waiting at your finger tips!

Flag Feature

If you have Outlook 2003, consider using the Flag feature to color code your emails; action types, to do’s, etc.

O Orange – To Do

O Green – To Call

O Red – Set Up Appointment

O Blue – Personal

O Purple – Business

Categorizing

Categorize your emails by Action Type. You can sort your emails by sender, by date, by subject and you can sort by Category. Plus you can incorporate the flags into this system to dictate what still needs to be accomplished.

Leave It

Why not just leave all of your emails in your main inbox and don’t file. If you need to find an email sort by sender, subject or category.

If you can’t identify with any of these solutions, don’t worry! You still have one more style to check out. Remember, just because you like the IDEA of being a Visual Organizer does not mean you are one. Keep your mind open to the other two styles and let’s see where that puts you.

Email Organization: Logical

Logical: Neatly Filed Away

Does this sound like you? You are in constant control, chaos doesn’t even consider coming into your life, now if you could only figure out a way to systemize your inbox!

There are some wonderful ways to systemize your email inbox. You can even take it to the next level and organize your email folders in the same fashion as your paper files! This way you always know where to look, regardless of what application you are using.

Organize With Folders

Determine what folders make sense to you and your business and create folders for your inbox. These can be by client, project, action type, etc. Whatever makes the most sense to you and how you think. I would even recommend setting up your computer folders in the same logic as your inbox and paper files. Keep it consistent whenever possible.

Organize By Action

As soon as you have acted on an email, file it away immediately! Do not let it clog up your inbox needlessly.

To Do’s

For those emails that have an action associated with it create a folder strictly for To Do’s. Just make sure that you are NOT an “out of sight out of mind” thinker. For the Logical organizer it’s very important that your To Do’s are nicely filed away, they aren’t distracting and you control what you do and when.

A key component of being a Logical Organizer is control. If you must have order and control you are more than likely a Logical organizer.

Identifying Your Email Organizing Style

I haven't done an email organizing post in quite a while, so I figured I should probably start it up again!

What better way to come out of hiding then by identifying your email organizing style?

Knowing your email Organizing Style is very similar to knowing your favorite food. If you are a vegetarian you aren’t going to choose to go to Texas Roadhouse for a steak. Same goes for your inbox. If you are a Visual organizer, filing away your To Do emails would mean certain disaster. We just need to figure out what works best for YOU!

There are essentially three styles of organizing:

1. Logical
2. Visual
3. Inspirational

If you are more Visual you are going to need Everything in One Place, Logical is more of a Neatly Filed Away style and Inspirational is a definite Do and Delete.

During the next several blog posts, think about what makes sense to you and your current habits. NOT what style you would like to be, but what style you ARE. With the listed scenarios you will find that you identify with one more than the others. You may choose the Visual method because of the logic behind it or because it’s the easiest solution. Which ever option you choose, just make sure it makes sense to you.

Fun Tip!

If you can’t find an email, but you know who sent it,

go into your Contacts, open their contact card, click on Activities.

You will now be able to see all of the emails you have ever sent to them,

they have sent to you and it will tell you what folder it is located in!

Tomorrow, I will break down the email organizing for the Logical organizer.

Until then,

Happy Organizing!