You DO have power over email!

Yes, you do have the tools for taming your email inbox. More than 55 of EctoHR, Inc. clients received those tools for time and sanity-saving recently from Randy Dean, the E-mail Sanity Expert and author of ‘Taming the E-mail Beast’.

EctoHR clients from various industries, including financial services, construction, hardware, real estate, insurance, universities, law firms, software companies, fitness, and CPAs all took a few key points from Randy to help them manage the deluge of email they receive on a daily basis.

Because of the close relationships he has with EctoHR clients, Steve Williams, president of EctoHR, Inc., knew time and email management was a big, yet silent, concern for many of them. Making Randy Dean’s seminar available to clients was one way to address the concern.

“While it seems our clients spend a lot of time on the technical skill training and industry specific knowledge, most do not invest in the core skills that impact everything they do,” Steve explained. “And that is time management, effective communication, and dealing with the mass of email that comes in every day”.

Email Taming Tips

Whatever email service you use, Randy’s top email tips are sure to help:

1. Check your email account at scheduled and regular intervals. This will avoid the chronic checking and re-reading of each email that comes in. Randy indicated that the first time you read an email you should immediately make a decision on how to handle it.

Emails that take 3 minutes or less should be handled quickly and immediately. Emails that require more than 3 minutes can be tasked or calendared accordingly. By following Randy’s email decision tree, you can avoid being like the average workplace professional that reads each email between 3 and 7 times!

2. Build a file system within your email software to archive emails quickly once you have tasked or completed the email.

3. Stop:

– Sending FYI emails. Email is swamping your coworkers’ email also.

– Unproductive “email tag”. If you are trading emails back and forth and miscommunication is obvious, go find the person and talk it through to save time.

4. When forwarding or replying to messages where the topic of the message changes, change the actual subject line, so all receivers know something new is on their plate.

5. Use the signature function of Outlook or Gmail to create automated email text for anything you find yourself sending over and over. For EctoHR clients, this may include canned responses to client inquiries, common text used when sending our RFQ’s to subcontractors, and other situations where you may find yourself writing nearly the same thing on a regular basis!

For more information on time management and email wrangling, visit Randy Dean’s website at www.randalldean.com.

EctoHR, Inc. is here for your company To find out how to get added to our professional development seminar invitation list, contact a team member at EctoHR by calling 810.534.0170, or by email to hr@ectohr.com.