Tip of the week #9 - Keep your team inbox clean

Clean inbox habit is essential for your team's productivity and time management. Here are a few quick and easy steps that you can follow to keep your inbox clutter-free.

When you find an unread email in your team inbox, take one of the following actions on the email immediately after you read it:

Assign - either to yourself or to a team member who is responsible for the work item. When each member in the team does this routinely, your unassigned view will always remain near empty. You can be assured that every thread is properly delegated, and each email will get the attention it needs—no more missing out emails.
Reply - if you think it only needs less than five minutes of your time. After replying, archive and be done with it.
Archive - if the email does not need any work to be done. Keep your space clear for the emails that should be worked on.
Snooze - when you think the email can wait for a few days or hours, or if you want to be reminded of it later. Make sure that you pick up the thread before you snooze, else assign it to another member. Note that when you snooze a thread, it is snoozed only for you and not for your team.
Delete - if the email is totally unnecessary.

Doing one of these five as the first step, will put threads where they belong. You and your team can then take them up one after the other. Find all the threads that are your responsibility under your 'Assigned to me view'. This is now the only view that every member of the team should take care of.

You can also make use of team tags to categorize threads for future reference.

Try these simple steps and tell us how it worked out for you. We'd love to hear what other topics you want us to discuss on. Let us know in the comments below.

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