3 hot products that will help you get control of your email inbox

A long time ago, when our kids were in kindergarten, a friend of mine made an interesting comment about how her kid approached classroom projects. She said, “When all the other kids are cutting paper, my son cuts the air.” It was a funny little comment about how easily distracted he became in the classroom setting—and this was well before the era where everybody has a smartphone in their hand at all times.

With the insane amount of plates that we spin as real estate professionals and the huge amount of information and potential distraction that flies by us each and every day, the question is: Do you cut the air? Do you waste time fiddling around with unproductive and unfruitful tasks? Do you dilly dally on Facebook or Instagram when you could actually be creating marketing materials or selling homes?

David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity makes lots of recommendations about how to stay focused and complete activities quickly and efficiently. One of my favorite recommendations that he makes is with regard to email.

When you receive an email, you are to do one of three things: 1) delete it, 2) if the required response or issue takes under two minutes, handle it and then file the email, and 3) put items that take more time into a separate file to address later. According to Allen, “It takes longer to read it, close it, open it, and read it again than it would to finish it the first time it appears. In a heavy email environment, it would not be unusual to have at least a third of them [emails] require less than two minutes to dispatch.”

Get Control of Your Email Inbox

In addition to Allen’s email productivity tips, here are three apps that I’ve found to be exceedingly helpful when it comes to managing your email inbox and, as an extension, your busy life:

1. Unroll.me – This product is a great way to help you keep your inbox a little bit cleaner. With their simple system, Unroll.me identifies subscription emails and prepares a list of them for you. All you do is click through the list, and you can unsubscribe to the ones you don’t want. They also create a digest of your daily subscriptions so that the things you are interested in viewing are all in one place.
2. Sidekick by Hubspot – The folks at Hubspot have some pretty cool products, and this one is no different. With the Sidekick app, you have your own personal digital assistant that provides powerful profiles to your inbox, and also offers email scheduling (coming soon), and email tracking.
3. AwayFind – If checking email is what you do constantly, then you probably need a service like this one. AwayFind will monitor your email account for important messages and notify you via SMS, Twitter DMs, IM tools or through its iPhone/Android app when important emails hit your inbox. You set up the filters, and away you go.

#EmailProductivity