No matter your role in the travel industry, being able to manage and organize your email inbox is an important skill. Organizing your emails can help you communicate more effectively with colleagues, clients, and other professional connections promptly. Employers often value candidates who can use email software functions to filter, categorize, and sort their messages for more efficient communication practices.
In today’s post, we share 5 steps you can take to learn how to organize your emails to make you more efficient.
1. Sort your emails into folders
When you’re able to sort through and prioritize emails, you can improve how quickly you respond to the most important messages. For example, if you create a sorting system that puts all of your must-answer emails in one folder, you can focus just on getting through that folder and reduce distractions from non-urgent messages. For example, cancelation requests, payments due, quotes, etc. Communicating efficiently shows your time management skills and respect for people’s time.
2. Create a to-do list from your emails
If you receive emails with calls to action, you can use email organization to create a to-do list from these messages. Then, you can see how many tasks you have and estimate how much time it will take to complete them. This allows you to dedicate specific amounts of time to each task, helping you plan your day. Once you have an established email organization system, you’re also less likely to sift through email messages to determine what needs to be answered and when what actions you need to take, or whether the email is important. This is especially true when you effectively implement automated sorting functions in your email inbox.
3. Use tags and folders to make searching for emails easier
Using tags, filters, and folders can help you search for messages faster. For example, if you use client tags, you can more easily search through just the messages that have a certain client tag. This can reduce the time you spend looking for important emails, including those you’ve already answered, have yet to answer, and already archived.
4. Make templates for frequently used responses
If you frequently send emails with the same content, consider using your provider’s functionality for saving segments of text as quick response additions. The process typically involves highlighting the text you want to use in the future, clicking a button to save the highlighted text as a quick response insert or email template, and then finding it later in your quick response collection when drafting a new message. You can use this function to create customizable templates and for small segments of text you often send, such as your contact information or commonplace calls to action.
5. Categorize with labels, tags, and flags
Labels and tags allow you to assign email-specific categories that help you search for emails in your inbox or auto-move them to certain folders. These might include the name of individual projects, clients, types of tasks, or deadlines. Flags can come as color-coded icons, and you can create your color-code system for prioritization or categorization. Some providers also have priority flags you can add to emails so the recipient can see that the email is important. You can use these categorizations to find specific messages quickly or to further sort your folders by priority, task type, and project relation. Tip: If you use Gmail, and you use the starred system, you can simply click on the starred folder and use that as your to-do list.
