Manage Emails With Tools That Actually Work

The average US worker spends 6.3 hours per day checking email. That’s over 6 hours of your life that you’ll never get back. Yikes.

It’s easy to spend hours in your inbox without even realizing it; between our work and personal lives, email has become one of our main means of communication. So if you want to cut down on the time you spend in your inbox, you need a strategy. And the best strategy comes in the form of a task management system; one that isn’t run from your email inbox.

In Buckets, we’ve created a feature called the Sandbox that acts as a holding zone all of our random thoughts, ideas, and to-do’s throughout the day. Sometimes you’ll move those items into a specific Buckets Project, and sometimes they’ll simply get done and deleted, but the Sandbox is where they hang out until you’ve decided exactly what to do with them.

We’ve recently added an addition to the Sandbox called the Sandbox Relay, which allows you to forward items directly to your Sandbox from your email inbox. This is a space where you can manage all of your actionable email items outside of the chaos of your inbox. Once an email arrives in your inbox, you simply forward it to your personalized Sandbox Relay email address and it’ll pop up in your view.

So what emails should you forward to the Sandbox?

Anything that is actionable, i.e. emails that require a lengthy response, have deadlines or task requests, or require a follow up at a later date. Any email that’s short and sweet and requires no further action can simply be responded to quickly or archived.

Once an item hits your Sandbox, it stays there until you have time to deal with it. Some of our users like to leave the Sandbox until the end of the day and use that last hour to work through their sitting tasks. Other users like to instantly assign an item to the relevant Project when it hits the Sandbox.

Assess > Assign > Act > Archive

Assess the status of the task. Can you act on the task right now? If so, get it done and delete it from your Sandbox.

Assign it to a specific Project and/or team members. Does the task require more completion time? Is it an ongoing task? Does it require collaboration or can it be delegated? If so, add it to the relevant Buckets Project or make it a standalone Project. Don’t forget to add deadlines to any time sensitive actions.

Act on the task by adding detailed Notes/creating a Kanban workflow to take it from to-do to done.

Archive the Card or Project you’ve assigned the task to if you won’t be using it again.

Be Proactive, Not Reactive

To get started today, go to Settings > Sandbox to view your personalized email address and add it to your email contacts list under Buckets. Once you’re up and running, this process will help you take control of your inbox instead of allowing it to control you!

Thanks For Reading!

Buckets helps to supercharge collaboration and organization needs across the world. If you enjoyed reading this post, please let us know by clicking and holding down the 👏 button!

To sign up for Buckets, just click here.

For regular updates from the Buckets team, you can also catch us on Twitter @bucketsdotco.