Drowning in emails? How I achieved a controlled and calm email Inbox

20 Jun Drowning in emails? How I achieved a controlled and calm email Inbox

Working as I did for many years as a CIO, one area I always struggled to get budget support for was helping users and the business manage email correspondence. It’s just not a very sexy area. There are always higher priority areas for a business to spend money on and It is not easy for managers to see how it directly supports a business’s revenue generation, customer support and reduce risk – but of course it does!

Email is intended to streamline communication, but it can become a counter-productive tool when the inbox requires so much time and effort to manage and/or when you need to collaborate with other colleagues to support customers and sales activity. Email can be extremely unwieldy and detrimental to our productivity if we (or the company we are working for) let it. 

In general, there are two key areas to support email management for me as a user; personal email discipline and business email discipline required to support sales, customers and business operations.

Much is written about personal email discipline and how to become more productive. I always find setting aside specific times during the day to read and send emails is a big help to my productivity. However, not so much is written about a company’s email discipline, which is probably more important for your staff.

For me, I can stay calm when facing the daily deluge of emails, because of the central database of emails we maintain. The central database is up-to-date in real time and is organised by customer, supplier, project, etc. making it extremely quick and easy to file and find email information  – much of the filing is automatically done for me.

To create and maintain this central database of emails we use an email management tool called Knowledgemill, this can be plugged into my Outlook or available on a mobile device. It means I am copied in on less emails as they are always available centrally and I can find any information stored in an email very quickly and easily, regardless of the age of the email. 

For the business, it means all staff spend much less time searching and finding emails and find it easy to answer customer questions which is particularly useful when the conversation has been with another member of staff.

If you would like everything relating to your email to be calm and controlled click on the link www.knowledgemill.com to find out more.  I would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill can help your business, explain the system in more detail and show how Knowledgemill could help your organisation.