6 Smart Ways to Ninjafy Your Inbox for Maximum Productivity
As an Office Ninja, you support, champion, and enable a diverse team of employees to spend their eight hours at work as best they can.…
Tag: ninjalife
As an Office Ninja, you support, champion, and enable a diverse team of employees to spend their eight hours at work as best they can.…
Shifting our attention from one task to another, as we do when we’re monitoring email while trying to read a report or craft a presentation, disrupts our concentration and saps our focus. Each time we return to our initial task, we use up valuable cognitive resources reorienting ourselves.The obvious solution? More technology, of course. In an effort to simplify our administrative processes, we’ve added oodles of tools to the mix. However, sometimes blending a bit of simplicity with those very tools is more effective than a new browser plugin. So, with all the bells and whistles available, how do we get technology back on our side?
Start by limiting all the do-dads and plugins to achieve an ideal balance of productivity and usefulness. If a tool or app takes more time to navigate and customize, nix it. According to George Xing, Director of Analytics at Lyft,
Productivity is an attitude and lifestyle, not a set of magic tools. Being partial to a specific app is dangerous because you’ll rely way more on it than you should.Xing is totally right. You’ll want to divide your inbox maintenance into categories by function with only the most useful apps at your disposal. Popping into Gmail to look up a project’s details doesn’t take as long as crafting correspondence on behalf of the CEO. So it makes sense to apply mini strategies according to what you’re specifically doing in your inbox.
When it comes to checking emails, the name of the game is setting boundaries. Batch processing, or batching, is a technique common in technical environments. It involves collecting multiple data over a set period before analyzing it. As a Ninja, this means you would limit how often you check your email by either manually restricting your check-in times or adjusting your account to refresh every hour, rather than every few minutes.
Then, instead of interrupting your progress every time a notification pings, you’re able to maximize your productivity outside the designated email block. As Friedman notes, this will tremendously improve your concentration.
By checking 20 emails during a scheduled one-hour block of time, for example, you’ll be able to skim and sort the same amount as you would across what may have taken your entire morning if you’d checked them one by one. As a Ninja with a multitude of tasks, batching your inbox tasks can help you to schedule the rest of your day—and make sure you stick to it.
Remember, the idea is to trim how long it takes to write recurrent or new emails—not to complicate the inbox even further. This means focusing your email efforts on external communications, especially if you can reply to an in-house team member in person.
According to numbers crunched by researchers at Yahoo Labs, about half of all people surveyed reply to emails within 47 minutes. The real kicker? The most common reply time was just two minutes. Without making use of batching, imagine yourself interrupted every two minutes. Not good, right?
If you’re an executive assistant, you’ve got to split your time between supporting the executive while also handling communications related to that person’s work. There’s no way you’d be able to drop what you’re doing this often to reply. This is where you want to make use of labels. This often overlooked feature of most email suites is built right in and requires minimal setup time.
To start, customize the labels based on reply necessity. So for example, you would add three different labels with titles such as “immediate” “daily” or “weekly.” Then, if you’re out at a meeting and you get a few emails, you can prioritize them without actually responding. When it comes time for your next batching block, you’ll know where to head first.
If you’ve got a few spare minutes left in your batch block, write up replies to the emails labeled “weekly” and schedule them for later delivery. Streak offers this “send later” capability, but if you aren’t using the pipelines, Boomerang is a solid option as well. Ximena Vengoechea, a User Researcher at Pinterest, considers Boomerang to be one of her favorite productivity tools. She shares,
Eliminate time spent following up with Boomerang, a gmail plugin that allows you to schedule emails to return to you if the recipient doesn’t reply. No need to have a ‘Follow up with’ task list and dig up the old email.