by jay on September 24, 2009
Do you ever feel like everywhere you turn, there’s somebody or something waiting for your attention? You’ve got multiple email addresses – some personal, some work related; voicemail at home, on your cell phone, and on your work phone; actual physical mail at home and at work; a two-year-old wanting to push the garage door opener buttons every 15 minutes (or maybe that’s just me)…
A recent Lifehacker post called Reduce Your Inboxes to Streamline Your Workflow and Reduce Stress gave some decent suggestions for handing the amount of information coming at you from all these directions (though none addressed the toddler with the garage door obsession). This one caught my eye:
3. When possible merge inboxes together. Technology, thought it has given us more to be busy with, has also given us a myriad of ways to merge tools and tasks together and reduce our workload.
photo (adapted) by flickr user Derrick Coetzee
What a great idea.
If only you could have several email addresses coming into one mailbox. Gosh, that would be great. If the same team was replying to messages sent to different email addresses, imagine how helpful it would be if they could do it from one mailbox? That would awesome. It would be… it would be…
Email Center Pro!
Maybe you already get that Email Center Pro lets you manage multiple mailboxes from one location. But did you realize that you can have multiple email addresses feeding into the same mailbox?
Say, for instance, your customers send messages to you using sales@yourcompany, info@yourcompany, and support@yourcompany. You can create one mailbox, let’s just call it Customer Service, and route all those email addresses into that one box. Then, instead of you or your team logging in and out all day to check the three different addresses, they can just log into one place, and check one mailbox. Not having to hop around from one mailbox to another saves you time, which means your customers will be getting quicker responses. Everybody benefits.
Now if only Email Center Pro could figure out a diversion for my son…
by jay on September 17, 2009
We’ve all got a lot of email to deal with, right? If you’re like me, some mornings you check your inbox and you think “There’s not enough coffee in the world to fuel my excursion into that mess.”
But would you pay somebody more than $2,750 to come to your office and teach you how to reduce the email influx?
I didn’t think so. But somebody does…
There’s a UK company that offers email productivity training seminars for corporations. They say they teach your organization how to write emails and subject lines, how to reduce unnecessary emailing, etc, saving time and increasing productivity. Then they go away, and suddenly you and your coworkers are stress free because you’re all using the new techniques you’ve learned.
Now, if you’re a huge corporation and you want to throw money at a problem and hope it goes away, this sounds like it could be a winner. I mean, increasing productivity by wasting less time on unnecessary tasks is swell. All you need to hope for is that everyone remembers and puts into action all the lessons learned in the seminar (good luck with that).
Oh, and you also have to hope that everyone outside of your organization either takes the same seminar or absorbs it by osmosis. Or maybe you don’t get email from customers and clients?
So what makes more sense: Paying to learn how to be slightly more productive in how you use a tool, or adopting a new tool that has the productivity measures built right in? I mean — you could pay somebody money to teach you how to cook all your meals over an open flame, or you could just get a microwave.
When you adopt a tool like Email Center Pro, you learn how to do things a little differently, in the context of actually managing your email. You’re not just trying to manage the quantity you receive or the clarity of the subject lines, but the flow of your email itself.
Managing your email means getting messages to the right person with no hassle. It means switching inboxes easily to handle multiple addresses with ease. It means noting emails for follow up by others, to reduce the amount of back-and-forth emailing you need to do to resolve issues. It’s saved searches, tagging for organization, metrics for measuring results…
Ultimately, it’s about being in control of your inbox. Not learning how to be better controlled by it.
