Some very useful and practical advice from this article that was originally published at Harvard Business Review and apply to maritime email as well.
The average professional spends 28% of the work day reading and answering email, according to a McKinsey analysis. That averages to many hours spent on hundreds of messages received per day. Here are some best practices that will help you to get back unnecessarily lost time.
- Use search and Omni tags, not folders, to find emails.
Most people create folders for various subjects or people or types of messages to archive accordingly. On average, people create a new email folder every five days. But this approach — clicking on folders to find what you need — is slower than searching with tags and keywords, or much slower when compared with Omni search using a combination of text and common operators (i.e., from, addressee, vessel, type, project etc.) - Plan on how to check your emails.
Use Telix features like Alarms, High/Low preference senders and saved selections of messages to focus on what is important. Depending on your role in the company, scheduling time every hour to check non-essential messages, will save time. - Filing emails into many folders requires time.
Roughly 10% of the total time people spend on email is spent filing messages they want to keep. We know that folders aren’t needed for re-finding emails, so how many do we really need? According to Hick’s Law a choice decision between 37 folders is five times slower than a two-folder decision; we need to multiply accordingly for hundreds of folders. - Avoid processing irrelevant or less important emails individually.
Make sure that your Inbox messages are relevant to you. Telix offers the convenience of unified mailbox (i.e., multiple email accounts) but also offers the ability to separate your email accounts in two groups: those of your primary interest and those that you want to inspect occasionally. Don’t fall into the trap of having everything in your inbox.
Use incoming rules to automatically process your messages and an antispam filter to keep spam messages away from your Inbox.
According to data from Sanebox, more than half of all email is not important and can be processed in bulk (i.e., deleted or tagged for archive). - Contact Telix helpdesk.
We will be happy to assist you implementing email best practices with your Telix system.
LgMAR is a software company founded by a team of dedicated experts in computer science and maritime business, to develop highly specialized software in the area of telecommunications. LgMAR is recognized as a leading company in communications software with several hundreds of installations and thousands of satisfied users. Clients are based mainly in Greece, but also in a number of other world regions (Europe, North and South America, Far East, Middle East) mostly in the Shipping related section (Ship Owners, Ship Managers, Ship Brokers, Ship Agents, Operators, Banks, Insurance Brokers, Manning Agents, Transport Companies, etc.)
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