Tip 340) ​Acquiring attention! Daily automation tricks for your inbox

Thanks to the lovely Sarah Newland from KeyboardSmash for her great email tips. 
 
My top tip for saving the amount of time you spend being distracted by emails flying into your inbox is to divert them! Auto-organising your inbox so that you are in control of what you read and when, is the true answer for transforming your inbox.

​Gmail
The tools I use most in Gmail are filters and labels. Lots of unread emails in your inbox makes it hard to prioritise and is overwhelming; we then use precious time and energy thinking and worrying about what to action next. 

​Filters help by organising your email automatically into folders (on Gmail they are called labels) so that you can decide when to action certain categories of work.
 
At around 12 minutes long, this is a great video that takes you step-by-step through setting up filters and labels on Gmail. The way that I use filters and labels finishes at about 8.40 minutes, but there is one more function that you may find useful if you watch until the end.

Example: In my KeyboardSmash email inbox, my client emails are set up to automatically filter into different client folders so that I don’t miss anything. I can then work on the client's email when I have allocated time to them, rather than getting distracted while I am working on something else.
 
It is not necessarily about moving stuff you don’t want to read (although it works for that as well!)—it is about categorising so that you know where to find something when you want it.
 
Outlook
Now I am not going to lie; I am a Gmail girl through-and-through. But I do manage Outlook inboxes on behalf of clients, so it is something that I am on-board with!
 
The tricky thing with Outlook is that the way it works is different depending on whether you access it through Office 365 in your browser or if you access it directly on your Mac/PC, and also which version you have if you bought the Office Suite outright.
 
This quick 2-minute video is for Outlook 2016 and is a great step in the right direction for setting up rules for your Outlook inbox(es).
 
I go into further detail with more automation and process-driven tricks over on my blog—sign up for updates at www.keyboardsmash.net/blog.

Good luck!
Sarah

Sarah runs KeyboardSmash, onboarding and customer journey support for small businesses. Having started out as a VA she helps business owners to professionalise their client facing systems. Her regular blog posts give practical support and advice for how you can improve things in your own business.