How to Increase Your Email Productivity

If you are like most people, you spend far too much time every day looking through your email to decide which ones are worth keeping and when to hit the delete button. Email is great for transmitting information and sharing with our family and friends as well as making our workdays more efficient. However, it can also be a major time waster as you decide which ones are worth your time. Employees spend about a fourth of their day managing their emails.

To deal with the problem, new applications are making it easier to control unwanted or unimportant messages and manage your email. Here is a look at a few of them.

Sanebox

Sanebox filters messages that aren’t that important into a separate folder that you can view at a more convenient time, while alerting you to the more important emails. There is nothing to download and it works with any type of email account anywhere you check it. It keeps your email private and can even send you a summary so you get a quick overlook without even going through your emails.

AwayFind

AwayFind finds you when you have an important message that needs instant attention. You can choose which emails are important enough to interrupt your day by either the person or subject.  It will also alert you to emails you get about upcoming meetings. AwayFind will also show you who you respond to and how quickly so you can determine if you should get notifications of their emails.

When you set an alert, you determine how long it should last. If it is just an important message for today, you can set it for just the one day. You have several options for how you want to receive the alerts. It can be through emails, phone alerts, Twitter messages, and instant messages through AIM or Yahoo. When you use Gmail or Outlook for your email account, it makes it even easier since it is integrated into their systems.

With these and other applications, you can spend less time looking through your email and more time focusing on the important tasks of your day.

[Image via adpunch]