Email productivity hacks for accountants

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My previous post explained some productivity hacks for writing. This post has three hacks to help you manage your email efficiently.

Close your mail app

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Whatever app you use for your email keep it closed except for the specific times you actually want to read and reply to messages. Doing this cuts out all the notifications. 

The problem with an always-open email app is the risk that when you go to it you get sucked into reading and replying to messages when you have more important or more urgent thing to do.

I suggest you set yourself specific times when you will do your email, say 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes towards the end of the day.

If an email can be dealt with quickly, whether that is to delete it, archive it or write a short reply, do it straightaway. If an email needs a longer response, record it as a task in your todo list.

Filter your mail

Use the power of your email app to process some (most) of your messages for you. Some of the filter rules I use are:

  • messages from people connected with a charity I volunteer for go into a separate folder, marked as read

  • I assume that messages that are copied to me are not urgent and therefore if my name is not in the ‘To’ field then the message is marked as read and moved into a folder called “Copied to me”. I rarely look in that folder.

  • any message with the word unsubscribe in it is marked as read and moved into a “Newsletter” folder. I look through them occasionally to see if there is anything I want to read.

You could do more. You could identify messages from certain people, such as your line manager, and add a colour to them so they stand out. You could send all messages with unsubscribe direct to the trash.

Each mail app will do filtering in a different way so you will need to research how to create the filtering rules for your particular app.

Search the archive

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Aside from the folders above that I created as destinations for incoming messages I do not want in my Inbox but do not want to auto-archive, I have only one folder, the Archive. When I have dealt with a message I either delete it (my preference) or send it to Archive. This is also true of the messages filtered out by rules described above. 

I do not structure my folders. I rely on the mail applications search feature to find anything I need in the future. Even with 15,000 messages (I just checked), the search feature is fast and I can do it on my phone, a tablet or my computer. 

To search for a message means I need to know something about it (the sender, a keyword or phrase, a date) but that is all I need: I do not also need to know where I would have filed it. Sometimes I cannot find what I am looking for. The chances are that is because I have deleted it. I am confident that I would have fared no better if I had structured folders and at least I save the time spent creating and maintaining such folders.

Do you have any tips or hacks to share?

Let me know your productivity tips and perhaps I could include them in a future post.