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Most of us are spending a considerable portion of their working time reading and writing e-mails. An average office worker spends 1-2 hours daily, dealing with email, which is up to 25% of working time. We may have tens or hundreds of emails waiting for us when we arrive in the office and it may take a lot of time to deal with them.

But what if we could handle our mail faster? We will have more time for other work tasks then and we could finish our day earlier. Following I will give you some tips how you can save time on e-mail communication:

• Decide when you read your e-mails. Having certain times during a day to read emails is a good time management practice. Checking e-mail twice a day is enough for most of us. The advantage of dealing with incoming mail on a certain time is that you will deal with a large number of mails together. In total, it will take you less time to read your mails in comparison of checking mail for every hour and dealing with only a small number of them at one time.
• Deal with one mail only once. You should open a message only one. After opening it read it through immediately (if is worth reading) and make a decision what are you going to with it. Are you going to reply to it, forward it to others, are there any actions to be taken by you? Make that decision at once.
• Learn to speed read. Speed reading techniques will enable you to work through you mail faster and you will save a lot of time.
• Send less mail out. Avoid sending mail when there is no need for it. In many cases making a phone call is more efficient than sending an e-mail. Before writing a mail ask yourself is it better to call or send mail on that occasion. Do not send jokes, videos and other funny stuff to other people. It wastes your and their time.
• Keep you messages short. Writing shorter messages will cost you less time, but you will also save the time of the recipient. Write a clear heading to the mail, so that it could be understood at once what the message is about. A good email starts we a call to action, it means that you tell at one what do you want to achieve with this mail, for example organize a meeting, send a report, ask for permission etc. Next, there should be the details of the issue in the middle part of the message, where you present the relevant information. Finally, the message should have a clear conclusion, where you summarize main points and repeat the call to action.
• Delete spam immediately. Do not waste your time on reading junk mail. Usually the mail program can send that kind of mail automatically to the spam folder and you should not waste time on reading these mails. Still, some times may happen that the spam filters send mails that you need to the spam folder. Therefore before deleting spam you should check the sender and title of these mails.
• Teach others to send you less mail. You are likely to receive 80% of mail from 20% of addresses, which belong to the people you work in close relations. If you tell them not to send unnecessary mail, then you can reduce the amount of your incoming mail.

kristjan time management communication, email, phone call, speed reading techniques, work tasks