Welcome to the Year One -blog! A series of posts where I, a fresh graduate, break down prejudices a youngster might have when entering the work-life rat race. My name is Martin, and as a young engineer, I try to write about work stuff that’s relevant for all ages, but with a young person’s perspective. Are the prejudices young people have about work true? Or are we just naive? In an attempt to find out, I will return to certain topics after a while and analyze what I have written.
–Martin Ekman
First up, Death by Email!
We’ve all heard or seen someone complain about how their inbox is fuller than a centipede’s sock drawer, and how they need to try tidying up their inbox in a constant stream of more or less important emails. Especially after a vacation.
During my first weeks here at Chemigate, the thought crossed my mind – Am I doomed to the same fate? My inbox is, right now, very easy to manage. Nonetheless, during this month I have felt that the inbox does very easily become cluttered with a lot of FYI-style messages, discussion emails, and whatnot. This leads to important emails blending in with the masses far too easily.
Let’s assume one can save two minutes a day by having an organized inbox. In the long run, this leads to HUGE time savings, as this saves around 40 minutes per month (assuming 20 work days/month). If you do this for 30 years, it leads to over 230 saved hours! From 2 minutes per day!
How can one save this precious time then? My strategy involves having a select few folders for organizing my work emails while being liberal with the delete and archive buttons. The actual inbox is merely a pit-stop before the emails end up in the folder they belong to:
- Requires Action
- Important Internal
- This Month
- Personal
- To Read Later
The folders I use for email management
Additional methods for saving valuable time spent on emails include macros, learning valuable hotkeys, and speed reading & typing. I have not, however, started using these methods yet.
How do you manage your inbox?
Thanks for reading!
//Mate
Want to leave feedback? Send me an email! (Heh.)
marketing@chemigate.fi