Archive for the ‘Email’ Category
5 Top Tips for Managing Your Emails
Friday, September 17th, 2010Technology is a wonderful thing – it allows us to work virtually, from anywhere in the world, and makes our lives easier. However, it can also hinder us, and this is particularly true in the case of emails.
Every day we are bombarded with hundreds of emails, only a small percentage of which are necessary. Spam filters are great at filtering most of the unwanted emails but a small amount do get through, adding to the number we have to sift through!
We can spend hours each day checking, sorting, and reading our emails only to find we haven’t the time left for actual work! Here are my top 5 tips for managing your emails and giving you back your much-needed time.
1. Emails aren’t urgent! Don’t feel you have to read an act upon your email the second it hits your inbox. You don’t! It isn’t urgent. If there was a real emergency then your client/colleague/friend would call you.
2. Are all those newsletters you subscribe to really necessary? Probably not! If this the case spend some time going through them and unsubscribing the ones you don’t really want or read.
3. Does your email play distracting alerts, i.e. a sound? If so, disable it. This is a distraction and you could quite easily stop what you’re working on to go and check your emails. It will then take you some time to get back on track again, not to mention the amount of time you’ve just lost stopping what you were doing, reading your emails, and actioning them.
4. Schedule set times to check your emails. Once or twice a day is enough, say first thing in the morning and again later in the day. If you subscribe to various industry groups save reading these emails until you take a break from your work – maybe at the end of the day when you’re winding down. You can easily get sidetracked reading all the different topics and replying to them, all of which is taking you away from your paid work.
5. Utlise email filtering tools. Set up folders and filters so that your email gets sent to the appropriate folder as soon as it arrives. Don’t know how to do this? Read my article Is Your Inbox Getting You Down? How to Avoid Inbox Overwhelm available on my website.
If you follow these 5 tips above, you will find you are spending less time worrying about and checking your emails, and more time on being productive! That has got to be better for your bottom line.
| About The Author
Tracey Lawton is a certified Master Virtual Assistant with many years of experience, helping professional speakers, coaches, and authors operate an efficient, organized, and profitable business. Visit http://www.traceylawton.com/tips.htm to subscribe to her newsletter, Virtual Solutions, full of tips for operating a more productive business and receive Tracey’s ‘The 7 Key Steps to an Organized and Efficient Office’ special report absolutely free.
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The Human Body!
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010It takes your food seven seconds to get from your mouth to your stomach.
One human hair can support 3kg (6.6 lb).
The average man’s private area is three times the length of his thumb.
Human thighbones are stronger than concrete.
A woman’s heart beats faster than a man’s…
There are about one trillion bacteria on each of your feet.
Women blink twice as often as men.
The average person’s skin weighs twice as much as the brain.
Your body uses 300 muscles to balance itself when you are standing still.
If saliva cannot dissolve something, you cannot taste it.
Women reading this will be finished now.
Men are still busy checking their thumbs.
This one made me laugh out loud…
How To Protect Your Address Book
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009HOW TO PROTECT YOUR ADDRESS BOOK!
I learned a computer trick today that’s really ingenious in its simplicity. As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your email address book, and sends itself to everyone in there, thus infecting all your friends and associates. This trick won’t keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it from using your address book to spread further, and it will alert you to the fact that the worm has gotten into your system.
Here’s what you do:
First, open your address book and click on “new contact,” just as you would do if you were adding a new friend to your list of email addresses.
In the window where you would type your friend’s first name, type in “A”. For the screen name or email address, type “AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA“.
Now, here’s what you’ve done and why it works:
The “name” “A” will be placed at the top of your address book as entry#1. This will be where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your friends. But, when it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered. If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phony address), the worm goes no further and your friends will not be infected.
Here’s the second great advantage of this method:
If an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAAA could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system. You can then take steps to get rid of it!
Pretty slick huh?
If everybody you know does this then you need not ever worry about opening mail from friends.