Tools to Help Conquer Your Email
We can all admit we’re suffering from information overload, right? We’re constantly interrupted by emails, texts, Tweets, a new Facebook status update, etc. Jonathan Spira wrote a book to address this problem called “Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization”. Some of the staggering statistics from Spira’s book include:
- Information Overload cost the U.S. economy almost $1 trillion in 2010
- Reading and processing just 100 e-mail messages can occupy over half of a worker’s day.
- It takes five minutes to get back on track after a 30 second interruption.
- For every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an e-mail, eight hours are lost.
As the CEO of a software company, I know I accumulate way too much email each day to possibly get through it all. I’m dependent on Google Priority Inbox to keep me organized and highlight my most important email. But is there a more effective way to manage email? After doing some research, I’ve found a few resources that manage email in three key ways: managing contacts, unsubscribing from useless subscriptions, and organizing your email as a whole. Let’s have a look.
Managing Your Contacts
I get so many emails everyday and it’s hard to keep track of who’s who when you only have an email address and name. Rapportive brings a visual element to your email contacts by adding a sidebar to the Gmail window allowing you to see information about the person with whom you are communicating. The information provided allows you to connect with them on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You can add notes to remind yourself of the relationship you have with that person. With Rapportive, no contacts get lost in your email, and you can keep up with them via social media. And an added bonus – the sidebar hides Google ads.
But what about your Gmail address book? The contacts in my Gmail can get really messy and it’s too much of a hassle to add specific information about each contact. WriteThat.Name acts like a personal assistant that constantly updates my address book in Gmail. WriteThat.Name augments information by analyzing the signature line of each person’s email. WriteThat.Name also lets you know via email which contacts have been updated that day.
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