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The communication tool that is supposed to speed things up for us is now becoming the main reason for missed deadlines and decreased productivity. Learning how to manage your email is key to a happy work or business life. Here are some tips to help you.

1.) Choose the best email tool for you.

Make sure you try out different email tools to manage your email. Examples are Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird. These tools will help you navigate and organize your emails better than your webmail.

2.) Create folders and labels.

Creating folders and labels for your email is one of the best steps you should take to manage your inbox. By doing this, you will ensure that you do not miss important emails and follow-up messages. Try to create a folder for important emails that you need to go back to in the future, another for urgent emails, and another for not-so-urgent ones.

3.) Keep your emails short and direct to the point.

To save time in going through all your emails, make sure that you keep your responses short and direct to the point. Avoid open-ended questions that will just cause multiple back-and-forth emails with the recipient, unless you really need some more clarification. An example is when setting up a meeting, try proposing a time and telling them to propose three other times if they are not available.

4) Reply immediately.

Make sure that you reply to your emails the first time you read them. This will prevent you from unnecessarily going through your emails multiple times.