
Sorting through your daily emails can be an awfully time-consuming affair, and can take a real chunk out of your working day. According to the technology marketing firm Radicati Group, the average corporate worker receives around 100 emails a day, much of it being spam.
It takes just over two hours for the average worker to sift through the raft of daily emails. That’s around 25% of a persons work day, if you base it on an eight-hour day. Sifting through them is a real slog, and that time that would be much better spent doing something far more productive. If you’re a small business owner, time is even more precious, as you will be juggling various jobs for your business.
Well there are plenty of apps out there that can seriously reduce this margin and help increase productivity. Here are 5 of our favourites.
1.Email Game: Clearing your inbox to zero might sound might seem fairly simple, but the reality is that very few people have email accounts that have an inbox of zero. Baydin’s Email Game is a useful Google Chrome extension that turns the process into game by setting a time limit for dealing with each message in your inbox and awarding points for each message you handle. If this is achieved you can prioritise and deal with messages in an orderly, uncluttered fashion.
2. SaneBox This handy app sorts your emails in order of importance, so all of your trivial and spam letters are shoved down at the bottom of your email list. SaneBox is an extremely flexible app, as it works on just about any platform you can think of including, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Apple Mail, Outlook, iPhone and Android. It doesn’t come for free, but the cost of the service is fairly reasonable, and they also offer a free trial.
3. Unroll.me: This is a great tool for dealing with the ever-present problem of spam. Sure you can block senders of spam, but the sheer volume can get on top of you fairly quickly, and individually adding senders to your block list can be a painstaking task. What Unroll.me does is heard all of your unwanted spam and place them all in one, utterly disposable email. There is also a button that allows you to unsubscribe to emails. The only snag is that the service is only supported by Gmail and Yahoo Mail, but most people tend to have at least one of these.
4. Yesware: If you’ve been in the same position long enough it is inevitable that you will have been asked the same question umpteen times. Writing the same generic response can be time-consuming and lets face it, pretty mundane. Apps like Yesware, there are many more in the same vein, allow you to create generic responses to specific questions and then allows you to categorize them. Yesware is available for free and has more than enough options for the average user, but there is a paid-for version for those who think they would benefit from the advanced options on offer.
5.FanMix: This is a great tool for social media professionals. There are plenty of websites out there that allow you to manage all your various social media platforms in one go. What FanMix does is allow you to manage all of your emails and notifications. The Gmail-themed inbox also allow you to view all of your posts, conversations and private messages. It is guaranteed to save you tons of time, and it is absolutely free.