Email - it's one of the fastest, professional, personal and secure ways of communicating with one another. So it's no suprise that some of us get flooded with new emails every single day. These can range everywhere from fluffy nonsense to career-breaking messages. Naturally, it's easy to get lost in your inbox attempting to respond to every piece of mail as soon as it arrives. You will never get anything accomplished going about it this way, and that's why you need to learn proper email management.

Email management refers to the overall strategy of receiving and responding to email as effectively as possible. There's more to it than simply reading and replying to email as fast as possible. But generally, that's what the phrase represents. Learning how to manage emails the right way is kind of like building up a rhythm that works best for you, and tweaking it until it fits.

Email Management Tip #1 - Schedule Time to Process Emails

Email Management Tip #2 - Upgrade to a Professional Email Program

Email Management Tip #3 - Answer "Easy" Emails First

Email Management Tip #4 - Send Emails That Provoke Responses

Email Management Tip #5 - Stay Organized

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The first mistake people make when attempting email management is to try clear their inbox out in one sweep. If you receive a high volume of messages daily, you will never be able to attend to them all at once. Furthermore, you'll end up wasting valuable time that you could use to do other, more productive things (like your work.)

What you want to do is to designate a specific time out of each day to managing emails. A good rule of thumb is to answer emails during downtime; that is, time where you aren't required to be productive. Or any spare time that might creep up and make itself known. 

Try an hour or so at first, and then adjust it accordingly. The key is to go through as many emails as you can during that time period. Once its up, don't answer any more messages. It might be hard to pull yourself away, but you're going to have to impose some self-discipline. 

If you're really serious about improving the way you handle emails, than you may want to consider upgrading to a professional email management program. The logic behind this is that you can reduce the amount of physical work needed by configuring an application to do it for you. 

Most free email alternatives lack the power of commercial email programs; like advanced filters and creating automated messages to answer common questions. This not only helps in keeping email management organized and accessible, it also makes said task more hands-off. Imagine how much easier life would be if you didn't manually have to delete spam everytime it shows up?

Some email programs to consider buying are Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, and Mozilla Thunderbird. 

Another pitfall of improper email management is to not answer the "easier" emails first, and go straight for the difficult ones. When I say "easy", I'm referring to emails that can be read through and responded to relatively quickly without extra research. It will seem natural to save these types of messages for later given their nature, but try to knock them out first. You will be able to process more emails this way.

If you do have a lot of important emails that require more work than simply reading and replying, skim through them before answering the easier ones. That way, you will be thinking of how to respond while taking care of the less work intensive ones.

Email management also entails replying back to emails, and there's nothing worse then having a very important email ignored because it got lost in the clutter of someone else's inbox. To encourage timely reactions to urgent messages, you need to send out email a certain way.

For starters, be brief. People are more likely to respond to a message that doesn't take them all day to read. Get straight to the point and stay professional, and you have a higher chance of your email getting answered in a timely fashion.

In addition, make good use of each email's subject line. This one of the first parts of a message that people see, so make sure it catches their attention. Again, being concise is a great way to go. Make the subject line say what the email is about, and if necessary, request a response.

Organization is vital to effective email management. The more email you receive, the easier it is for it to get "lost in the sauce". Sure, you could just search your entire inbox for messages as it becomes necessary to retrieve them, but why not make it easier on yourself? By categorizing email, the retrieval process becomes that much easier.

This can be done through the use of filters and folders. First, create the appropriate folders to store all the email you receive (i.e. Urgent Messages, New Customers, etc.) Now you can either manually sort your email, or you can program email filters to do it for you as they arrive. You will save yourself a lot of headache this way, even if it might not seem like it at first.

Learning how to manage email efficiently is a very useful skill. It can also be time consuming if done the wrong way. It's best to practice email management with your personal inbox first. Once you've built up an effective rhythm, you can try it out in the workplace.

Imagine all the things you could do with all that extra time...