Your time is precious and this series of lessons is about minimising wasted time so you can spend it doing higher value activities. Therefore, I bet you anything that there are messages in your sent items box that look remarkably similar. You are the centre of many people’s universe and they all want to pick your brains, so I’m betting you have answered the same question from multiple people many times! Right? Well, now’s the time to tackle that problem once and for all … This week we look at:
Empty your in box – everything should have its own place, and the inbox is not it!
Decreasing your response time – The One Minute Rule
Crafting effective messages
Highlight Messages sent directly to you
Using disposable e-mail addresses
Consolidate multiple e-mail addresses
- Script and automate repetitive replies
- Filter low priority messages
Build a set of scripted e-mail responses that you can drop into e-mails quickly. You will probably be familiar with out of office replies – which are set up via rules – but this is just one step removed from that, standard replies you can drop in wherever and whenever you need. Personalise them if necessary and then you can reply speedily without spending valuable time composing the same information over and over again. You maintain the control over the use and reduce your time in doing so all in one sweep. Here’s some links to finding out how ……
- Die-hard Gmail users should check out the “Canned Responses” feature in Gmail Labs;
- “Texter” for Windows at http://lifehacker.com/238306 ;
- TextExpander for Mac athttp://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/. You can try it for free but an individual licence will need to be purchased; and
- Quicktext for Thunderbird users at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/quicktext/
This is also useful if you are one of the lucky few to have the resource of a P.A at your disposal. A little effort from you in scripting the standard replies will make his or her life much easier too. So go on, see this as a random act of kindness either to yourself or to your P.A and make someone smile for the right reasons.
Improvement is everyone's concern: +44 1550 720902 will start that process today.
