When your entire team feels overwhelmed by the flood of emails each day and their to-do lists that just keep growing and growing, it may not be a coincidence. Many offices leave it to each individual to decide on their own email plans, but if your team comes together and decides on a company-wide plan, then team members can be freed up to spend less time on emails and more time on their job responsibilities.  Refocusing attention and priorities in the workday as a team effort also provides a good boost to those that aren’t naturally as organized as others.  Here are 3 reasons why an email management plan could work for your team:

1. Improves Efficient Communication - If you compose each email properly with a specific subject and include your email signature, hopefully you won’t receive as many emails looking for your contact information.  Recipients will also be more inclined to call you instead of type out another email to you if your phone number is right in front of them.
2. Reduces Digital Clutter - When you create a system that works for how to handle your incoming emails, you’ll be able to eliminate the clutter in your inbox quicker.
3. Saves Time for Your Team - If you can manage email effectively, especially as a team, you can reduce the amount of time you spend in meetings. Instead of making all the decisions face-to-face, your team can make those decisions through email.

Want additional tips on how to manage your email effectively? Follow The Productivity School’s blog for daily tips on email management and other productivity topics!

Many people who already have a Gmail account have probably noticed the new tabs that recently appeared in your inbox. Gmail has included new tabs labeled primary, social, promotions, and updates. With this new feature, your emails will automatically get sorted into these tabs (and more if you wish to customize them). Some people are complaining about the change, while others love it. After testing out the new inbox ourselves, here are our thoughts on this new feature:

Pros:

With these new tabs, Google does some of the thinking and sorting for you, which can save time when you’re checking your emails. It also eliminates non-urgent emails (such as newsletters and promotional deals) from your primary email inbox that can lead to distractions at work.

Cons:

The tabs put your emails “out of site and out of mind,” which can lead to forgetting about certain emails and tasks. Also, some people prefer to sort emails themselves so they feel more in control of their inbox.

What are your thoughts on the new Gmail Tabs? Let us know in the comments below!

Far too often, businesses are so focused on keeping up with their day-to-day tasks, that they fail to see how much time they’re wasting. In other words, they have a broken office. But, how do you know if you have a broken office? Below are a list of symptoms we frequently encounter in broken offices. Once you identify the symptoms affecting your office, you can work toward finding more efficient solutions.

Do these symptoms sound familiar?

• Hoarding information - People hoard information and documents because they don’t trust that there is a company-wide system in place.
• Misplaced files - Employees can’t find documents because there isn’t a file naming convention or method for tracking version control.
• Incorrect contact information - People in your company frequently email each other to gain access to a client’s contact information because there isn’t a central place to store shared contacts.
• Prolonged training - Your company spends too much time training new employees because systems aren’t documented properly.
• Poor space planning - You see your coworkers walk back and forth to their desk unnecessarily to retrieve items they frequently use (printer, client files, etc.) because they aren’t located near their desk.
• Duplicate efforts - People at your office unknowingly duplicate efforts because roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined.
• Unreliable technology - Your team gets frustrated with unreliable or outdated technologies that waste their time.

Showing multiple symptoms of a broken office? Schedule a free 15-minute consultation to discuss solutions with us!

After a relaxing and carefree vacation, it’s stressful returning to the office and finding an exploding email inbox and a massive list of tasks that have piled up while you’ve been out of the office. So much for that vacation! Here are three things you can do to prevent the stress from building up while you’re gone:

1. Set your out of office message before leaving

Having an out of office message sets the expectation for those who are trying to reach you that you won’t be responding to emails. This will also help to slow the amount of emails that come into your inbox the rest of the week. To really spruce up your out of office message, take some advice from Matt Heinz, of Heinz Marketing, and include a couple of interesting articles related to your business that people can read in the meantime.

2. Provide clients with an alternate contact

Ask a coworker if they can serve as the main point of contact for your clients and prospects while you’re on vacation. Add their contact information to your out of office message and spend 15 minutes bringing them up to speed on questions they may have to answer in your absence. You’ll feel peace of mind knowing your clients are being taken care of.

3. Have a coworker sort your email

Ask a coworker to sort your email into urgent and non urgent folders while you’re away so that when you come back you can respond to what is most important first. If you aren’t comfortable with someone else checking your email, spend 20 minutes when you get back quickly sorting all of your emails. Then you can start responding to the emails based on their importance and urgency.

How do you prepare for a vacation?  Let us know your tips in the comments below!

Now that the air is getting fresher and our days longer, it’s time for (you guessed it) Spring Cleaning!  When most people think of spring cleaning, they think of organizing garages and cleaning out the kitchen pantry, but we want to challenge you to clean areas you don’t immediately think of that may be hurting your productivity.

For the first phase of our three-part Spring Cleaning series, we want to address a program that many of us use throughout the day - Microsoft Outlook. Even though Outlook is a fantastic productivity tool, the reality is that it often gets neglected.  Here are a few tips to get your started cleaning your Outlook:

Mail

• Take a look at the number of rules you have in place.  Too many can slow Outlook down, so ensure you need all of them.
• Check your Drafts folder for any drafts that are no longer needed and can be cleared.
• If you haven’t done so in a while, empty your Deleted Items folder.

Calendar

• Are the appointments, meetings, and tasks on your calendar current?  Are there any recurring appointments that are no longer applicable?  Take a few moments to clean these items up.

Contacts

• Review your contacts: is your information current?  Delete or merge duplicate contacts.
• Add any new contact information you have been meaning to include (from business cards, scraps of paper, emails, etc.).

Tasks

• There is great satisfaction in crossing tasks off our to-do list, but after a while, these old tasks become clutter.  Delete tasks that you have already completed.
• Are you flag happy? Remove flags that are outdated or no longer require a follow-up task.

Notes

• Go through your notes section to delete those that are no longer relevant.
• If your notes could use some better organization, go through and categorize them or create folders to sort them into.

Clearing out your Outlook should take no more than 30 minutes, but if it requires more time, set aside 15-30 minutes each day until you feel refreshed.  Stay tuned next week for the next two parts in our Spring Cleaning series!

You’ve probably been frustrated by these email faux pas before. Perhaps you’re guilty of a few yourself? Here are 10 email faux pas to be mindful the next time you hit send on an email:

1. Subject Line Confusion: Subject lines can be a very valuable tool—they help us decide if we should open an email now or later (or delete it all together).  When there is no subject line, an irrelevant subject line, or a ridiculously long subject line, we feel like our time is being wasted. Remember to take a look at your subject line before you send. Is it still relevant?  Sometimes the subject of your email changes from the time you start writing to the time you finish.
2. CC’ing the World: CC’ing others is important, but make sure the people you’ve included actually need to be on the thread. Also, keep in mind the difference between “To” and “CC.” By including someone in the “To” field, you are implying that an action is required. “CC” typically suggests the person has been included for informational purposes.
3. Can I Have Your Number? Have you ever tried contacting an email correspondent via phone after an email conversation, only to find they don’t have an email signature?  Make sure your signature includes all the contact information others need to reach you.
4. Email Novels: Emails shouldn’t be the next War and Peace.  The very nature of an email is to be concise.  Channel your Twitter skills and make sure you’re not sending unnecessarily long messages.
5. Email Tweets: In the same vein, don’t you despise emails that are so short they didn’t deserve becoming an email in the first place?  If you have a quick comment or question, connect through instant message rather than email.  You’ll probably get a faster response too.
6. Tpyos: Did you catch that one? You should not have to guess what a word means.  Especially with auto correct and spell check. Take a moment to glance over what you’re sending before you send it.
7. Replying to the Wrong Part of a Thread: If you haven’t checked your inbox in a while and begin opening the earliest messages first, make sure you don’t respond to outdated emails.  Turn the “conversations” feature on in your inbox so you can respond to the most recent email in the thread, rather than comment on parts of the conversation that have been resolved already.
8. “Where’s the Attachment?” How many emails have you received detailing the important attachment you must review and sign off on, only to find the attachment was not…attached.
9. Too Big Attachments: How do you feel about emails with way too many graphics in the body?  If you need to send large files, images or documents, try sending them a link via Dropbox to download the files directly.
10. Wait, What Are We Talking About? If your thread conversation starts to round a corner towards a new topic, just start a new thread with the appropriate subject line.  This helps recipients stay on track with the conversation and find the archived thread later.

How many of these pesky faus pas are you guilty of?  Share this blog post with your team to help everyone avoid these tendencies and stay on track!