For many people these days, email = work.

It’s just the sad (or not that sad) truth of the modern world of professionals, entrepreneurs, creatives and everyone in between.

Quite frankly, if you’re not effective with your email, you might as well not even bother coming to work.

So let’s take a closer look into this topic today, and try to make ourselves a bit more productive with our emails. The key to all this is mastering certain email management skills, ten of them, to be more exact.

1. PICK YOUR MONEY-MAKING EMAILS AND PRIORITIZE THEM

Knowing where to focus the most attention and what to perhaps disregard totally is a game of email management.

You should search for a particular class of emails that just so happen to be more useful than everything else, regardless of your profession or the type of business you’re in.

Those emails are typically your sales emails or other emails that persuade a client to sign a contract with you if you work in any type of agency business (design, writing, freelancing, etc.). Making money involves mastering them. It has to do with how you convert your working hours into results.

When asked, “What is the #1 email management skill that entrepreneurs and professionals should master?” Ruben Gamez, the creator of the proposal programme Bidsketch, makes this argument.

His answer:

Learning how to segment email for response time. For example, at Bidsketch we’ve learned that the customers with the fastest response times to proposals, close more sales.

So how can you be responsive while not destroying your productivity? You should treat sales related emails differently, and send them either to a different folder, or email address. This leaves a much more manageable number of messages, that can be responded to soon after they come in. Other types of messages can (and should) wait.

2. TOUCH EVERY EMAIL JUST ONCE

What I mean is this. We frequently star important emails in our inboxes and persuade ourselves that we’ll return to them later. Later arrives, and we go through the same process once more, telling ourselves, “I’ll take care of this tomorrow.”

This is a major waste of time.

A simpler solution?

Try a variation of the “Touch It Once” principle that Ann Gomez taught me.

Simply said, respond to each email as soon as you “touch” it. This necessitates either responding to the email right away or assigning it to a different assignment somewhere else. Your inbox will remain empty this way.

3. DON’T TREAT YOUR INBOX AS A TO-DO LIST

Simply put, your inbox isn’t organised enough to qualify as a to-do list. If you do, you’ll find yourself fast lost in a sea of flagged emails, unfinished draughts, and possibly more than a few irate folks.

Instead, convert emails into tasks and transfer them to different tools.

Todoist is the method I advise using for this. It is essentially a cloud-based task management and to-do list. Additionally, it features excellent Gmail integration, which should make things much simpler for you.

In short, whenever you stumble upon an email that requires some action, turn it into a Todoist task and clear it from your inbox right away.

4. USE JUST ONE APP/TOOL ACROSS ALL YOUR DEVICES

Although it might seem obvious, a surprising number of people really fall into the trap of managing their email across numerous apps. Now, the issue isn’t just the abundance of tools. When those tools aren’t synchronised with one another, the actual issues arise.

The result is an inconsistent inbox, one that appears differently depending on the tool you use to access it.

Simple fix: Use the same tool across all of your devices. If you use Gmail, for instance, use the Gmail tool wherever possible. Use only Outlook if you like it. Just avoid combining several email tools.

5. DEAL WITH EMAIL JUST TWICE A DAY

Even though I might have said that “email is work” at the beginning of this post, it’s actually rarely the case.

For most people, email is not what makes the money, and therefore it shouldn’t take up most of your working hours.

A simple solution is to just deal with email twice a day: once in the morning, and once in the afternoon.

And most importantly, disable all email notifications. Notifications cause interruptions. Those interruptions are more costly than you would expect. For example, as explained in this resource by Harvard Business Review:

According to a University of California-Irvine study, regaining our initial momentum following an interruption can take, on average, upwards of 20 minutes.

6. UTILIZE TEMPLATE RESPONSES

The key to many people’s productivity is their ability to not reinvent the wheel with their email responses, so to speak.

The whole trick is identifying the exact moment when a template response could be employed, instead of re-writing the same email over and over again.

There are just two steps to mastering this skill:

1. Identify common scenarios and types of email that you send out the most often.
2. Create template responses for them.

One way to do it is with a tool like Yesware. Among its other features, it allows you to create such personalized email templates, and then send them out whenever needed.

7. TAME YOUR NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIPTIONS

If you’re like the majority of individuals, you undoubtedly subscribe to numerous internet resources (newsletters). There are probably a tonne of them, whether they are newsletters from your favourite sports teams, business news, or hobbies sites.

Visit Unroll.Me today. You may manage all of your email subscriptions with this single tool. Instead of receiving tens of separate newsletter emails, you can configure it to send you one digest email.

8. BE MINDFUL OF WHAT’S GOING ON IN YOUR INBOX

“A thousand things screaming for your attention” – just about does it for a good description of your inbox, doesn’t it?

I asked Catalin Zorzini, founder of Matcha-Tea.com, to shed some light on this problem, and answer one simple question: “What’s your most valuable email habit?”

His advice:

“Fabricating time.

What if that instead of training ourselves to work more, to become faster or more efficient, we could actually fabricate more time so that we could manage our inbox in a more relaxed mindset, without a sense of urgency?

From what I’ve learned, this is entirely possible and can be achieved quite easily.

Two things: Practice mindfulness, and apply the either “HELL YEAH!” or no approach to your inbox.

Cultivate a more relaxed way of “living while working.” What I mean by that is to overcome the “autopilot” mode, and to learn how to become more aware of every single task that we’re doing on the computer (especially dealing with email), make choices from a more grounded position, and mix “work” with “fun” so that we feel we have more time.

This way, we become able not only to achieve inbox zero, but to enjoy the miracle of being alive, which we take so much for granted when we are on autopilot.”

Realise, in other words, that what you do in your inbox directly affects what you’ll do the remainder of the day (or week). So keep that in mind and only invest time in activities that will benefit you. The best email management tip is to ignore the majority of it.

9. SEND SHORT EMAILS. ONLY.

If you’ve been in the military then you probably know what BLUF – “bottom line up front” stands for.

In short, it’s a communication principle that encourages us to start every message with the request at the beginning, rather than burying it or building up to it.

We tend to wrongly assume that our “ask” needs a sufficient built-up, or otherwise the person we’re contacting will say no. But as it turns out, people naturally omit the build-up part anyway and go straight to the “meat” of the message.

10. FIND REPLACEMENT TOOLS FOR THINGS YOU’D OTHERWISE DO VIA EMAIL

Even though we may be accustomed to email and are familiar with its capabilities and usage procedures, there are many times when we would be far better off forgoing email in favour of alternative solutions.

For example:

• Doing client proposals via email? Don’t. Use the aforementioned Bidsketch instead. It will not only track your every proposal, but it will also let you know when your clients see them.
• Using your inbox as CRM? Again, don’t. Check out Nutshell CRM or something similar. Way more effective and easier to grasp.

There are numerous examples. The general idea would be to always identify the email chores that take up a lot of your time and then look for more efficient alternatives. Something is always there.