10 Essential Tools & Habits to Manage Emails Like a Boss

Email management best practices…wait a second…that’s my phone buzzing. 

***Another 100 new emails received!***

Ugh! Another typical work dilemma–to read, or not to read the emails, yep that is the question.

In 2023, the number of emails sent and received per day was around 319.6 billion. Imagine the number! It’s quite obvious that our email inboxes remain clogged with unread emails while we play scavenger hunt to find the important ones. 

Here are some email management best practices I follow at work to keep my inbox organized, free of clutter, and open to important messages. I have listed down the necessary tools and habits that can help you manage emails at work.

10 Email Management Best Practices at Work

[Email Management Tools]

Pause Emails Using Boomerang

Boomerang can 

• Pause incoming emails
• Schedule meetings
• Write emails for you

Studies have shown that spending excess time checking inboxes can affect your mental health by causing distraction and increasing stress levels, eventually affecting your productivity. 

This is why it’s important to pause incoming emails until you’re ready to check them. You can use the Boomerang extension to manage your Gmail inbox and pause your emails anytime you want. 

It works on Chrome 5.0+, Safari 5.1+, Firefox 38+, Opera 15+, and Edge 39+.

Apart from the pausing feature, it can also turn the sent email into a calendar and the recipient can book an online meeting without any hustle. In addition to that, Boomerang also provides an AI-driven feature like Smartwriter to write the emails. 

Mike Kaiser, a Boomerang user says, “If you write a lot of emails, then the Boomerang extension for Gmail is your new best friend...”

Chat on Gmail Using Gmelius

Gmelius features 

• Live chat on email
• Shared Gmail inbox
• Shared labels
• Analytics
• Automate workflow

Gmelius is a great email management tool, especially for working teams. It provides a shared Gmail inbox and labels for team members. Anybody with an email address can be a part of the shared mailbox.  

You can chat instead of sending 100s of emails back and forth to your email clients to talk about basic things. It will not only save time but also reduce chances for any miscommunication. This is where Gmelius saves the day.  

You can use Gmelius to chat with the recipient without leaving Gmail. On top of that, you can also track email traffic and analytics of what's going on inside each project and reach company goals without any miss.  

The best feature of this software is the workflow automation. You can automatically assign email conversations to your subordinates based on your agents' load, send email autoresponders, apply SLA policies, and add labels.

If you and your team spend a lot of time on Gmail, Gmelius is a software you can try out.  

Assign Emails Using Hiver 

Hiver provides 

• Assigning features on email
• Email tracking feature
• Resolution status
• Automate workflow

Running a business or even managing one is heavy on the inbox. One might receive “urgent” emails 24 hours. In such a scenario, use Hiver to assign emails to your employees or subordinates. 

The best part of using Hiver is that it’s convenient for both you and your employees. Once you assign emails, the assignees get real-time email assignment notifications. This feature can help your teams prioritize what’s important. 

And, you can always track the resolution status of the emails: Open (default), Pending, or Closed, and review the ongoing-work if you want to. This is the reason why customer support teams or e-commerce businesses prefer Hiver above other software.

Also, there’s a rule-based automation feature that assigns certain emails to specific team members. So, if you’re in a managing position or owner of a business, I highly recommend Hiver to manage emails at work. 

[Habits to Manage Emails]

Schedule Your Email-Reading Time

According to a recent study by Adobe, office goers spend around 3.1 hours daily reading and writing emails. On a weekly basis, the total amount of time spent on emails is 15.5 hours. 

Now, you might be receiving emails all around the clock and inboxes filled with unread messages can be quite tempting. However, if you keep checking the inbox when email notifications pop-up, it will get extremely difficult to get any work done. 

Imagine the 3 hours divided into tiny 15-minutes all through the day!

So, the first habit for better email management is scheduling email-reading time. Keep an hour or so before starting the work, after lunch, or after finishing your shift; plan as per your convenience.  

Trust me; it’s the best way to manage your time, check your emails, and still get a massive amount of work done. 

Read an Email Only Once

Rereading an email over and over again is a complete waste of time. So, you read it once, respond if you want to, file it away and then move on to the next email.

Reading an email only one may not be possible for conversations that continue in a long thread. We tend to go back to old messages before writing the new ones, and that’s okay!

Most emails that receive on a daily basis don’t end up in a long conversation. Reading an email only once is a motto for those types of emails.

Write the 1-Line Replies

Almost 50% of the emails we receive everyday are queries, meeting schedulers, responses, etc. In simpler words, most of these emails can be answered with a single line. 

Emails that can be summed into “Where & When” take only 1 minute to answer and one must answer them regularly to keep the inbox clutter free. Writing the 1-line email responses will reduce pending emails significantly. 

Delete Your Way in the Inbox

Read an email only one
           ⬇️
Write the 1-liner replies
            ⬇️
Delete unimportant emails

Yep, deleting emails on a daily basis is a healthy email management practice. Once you start reading emails (during the scheduled period), delete all the irrelevant emails in the inbox. 

Anything that doesn’t require writing back, delete them. Check the promotional emails and the spam folder to delete the junk. 

Don’t forget to archive old conversations.

Automate

There is a Google Chrome Extension called Gmail Auto Follow Up. As the name sounds, it automates the emailing process. Just set up a sequence of emails to send to your prospects over time and it will send the emails accordingly. It will also follow up with your clients or prospects. 

In case you’re using other ESPs or you need to send emails in bulk, try Smartlead.ai. It will help do the same things but in bulk. Also, using this software you can have several email addresses to send cold emails from. It’s highly recommended for sending networking emails and also marketing ones. 

Read "99 Email Opening Lines”
to find the perfect opening for automated emails. 

Set-Up Labels, Folder & Categories

One of the best email management tips is organizing your inbox using set-up labels, folders, and categories. There are no guidelines on how to categorize the emails but it depends on you.

For example, a teacher might need multiple folders–one for assignments, one for homework, one for sending gardes, and another for personal emails. Similarly, a financer will create folders for invoices, reimbursements, and things like that. 

The goal is to prioritize, group, and sort email messages into categories. In addition to creating folders, you can also set up parent categories and subcategories to make things even systematic. 

For instance, a customer support person can have a parent category of “complaints” and then have sub-categories of “delivery” or “product-quality”, etc. 

Conclusion

Managing emails efficiently is very important to give your best at work. The above email management best practices have helped me streamline my emailing load. 

Follow them and you will have an organized inbox in no time. 

FAQs

How do you effectively manage work emails?

You can manage work emails effectively by organizing them, scheduling an “email reading” time, and replying and deleting regularly.  

What are the three 3 basic email etiquette?

The three basic email etiquette are using a polite tone in the email, having no errors, and following the standard format.