How to improve focus with email prioritization
Productivity masters cover many aspects of how to perform better and get more done, yet a major part is the requirement is to improve focus on the task/s at hand, or the ultimate goal/s. How are we able to achieve that when we are juggling a ton of tasks, are overloaded with emails (and new ones arriving throughout the day), and still have deadlines we must meet?
There is no secret, it is simply being able to prioritize emails correctly on what is important and what isn’t thus and increase effectiveness. Still, with hundreds of daily emails coming in (let alone what we already have in our inbox), it isn’t so simple to filter accordingly.
Knowmail’s features are directed for effectiveness, efficiency and productivity, with the first pillar being effectiveness, or in short, doing the right things. You may be an amazing worker, but if your focus is on unimportant items, or replying to emails which aren’t relevant at this moment, then you aren’t being effective, rather simply working with no proper focus.
Improve focus with inbox prioritization
As mentioned, it isn’t easy to go through a full inbox and prioritize items by importance. One would have to go through every email and rank it for the appropriate attention it requires. Besides having 100s of emails, making it difficult to get ahead, we must also set some sort of personal operation to know how to attend the important ones. And if this ordeal won’t add to your daily stress, it definitely will have its toll when you will have to do it again tomorrow…and the next day…and the next.
State-of-mind filters
Knowmail is built by individuals who have felt the burden of email overload on a daily basis, realized the issue of scattered focus, and created a solution with its state-of-mind filters.
These filters will automatically filter your messages into three separate filters: on-the-run, sitting-down, and show all. The way they are filtered is by Knowmail’s AI engine working in the background, understanding your personal behaviors and communication habits, being able to filter messages appropriately as if you had a personal assistant for your inbox, thus improving your focus every day.
On-the-run: high importance and critical
The on-the-run filter displays the most important emails requiring your attention. This in turn provides you laser-focus on the things that you need to attend to, especially when time is limited. So out of the 200+ emails in your inbox, you will quickly get a view of the high-priority messages you may attend to, and this will save time (from going through entire inbox) and reduce stress, knowing the most critical items are being attended to…even when away from your desk.
Another cool item is the time completion estimation provided by Knowmail, letting you know approximate time to finish with the most important items. What a breath of fresh air.
Sitting-down: important yet not critical
After finishing with the critical items we arrive to the sitting-down filter, which expands the messages displayed to include relevant emails that aren’t most critical. As named, these are emails that deserve your attention and can be attended to when actually sitting down in front of your computer, not necessarily on the run.
As with on-the-run, a time-completion estimation is provided.
Show all: entire inbox
Knowmail never-ever deletes or removes any of your messages without your consent or action. This means that this filter is your unified inbox, and you can rest assured nothing is ever omitted. Besides the messages provided in the other two filters, this one will include email blasts, newsletters, junk which not have been auto-filtered by Outlook, as well as items which are simply not seen as high priority. For the latter, Knowmail includes a score-adjustment capability in each message, so you may rate a message as higher (or lower) priority, to update your preferences for ongoing use.
Increase effectiveness
It is easy to get lost in our growing inboxes, never finding the time to go over all emails, let alone get to our real jobs (as we spend so much time just browsing mail), which is why Knowmail’s state-of-mind filters do the first step automatically. We provide a quick filtering of all emails, so you can improve focus appropriately and be able to attend the right emails, at the right time.
Originally published at www.knowmail.me on January 6, 2016.
Knowmail is an intelligent inbox assistant using personalized artificial intelligence to help professionals focus on things that matter most, do more with less effort and balance work and life. Get an invite!
