Being in business means there’s always something that needs to be done. Some tasks we look forward to and others we might not be so keen on. We all have email and diary management to do no matter what business we run, so this blog post gives you some top time-saving tips for handling your inbox and sorting out your calendar.

Try these tips for diary management

1. Add lunch and coffee breaks to your calendar - we all need to have time away from the screen, clients or even colleagues during the day to let the brain recharge.
2. Make time in the diary for exercise, travelling, dealing with school run and other chores - if you fill up your whole day with work meetings, you’ll finish the day still with many things to do and you’ll feel overwhelmed and stressed.
3. Set reminders for meetings so there’s no chance of missing an important client.
4. Respond to meeting requests as promptly as possible and double check that the meeting has gone into your calendar at the right time. This will avoid the possibility of being double-booked.
5. Take care with time zones if you are booking international meetings.
6. Consider the length of meetings - can you achieve what you need to do in less time? Try shortening meetings from an hour to 45 or even 30 minutes.
7. Don’t book in back to back meetings, especially if they are online. Being on-screen all day long is exhausting and you’ll be heading for burnout. Leave gaps between meetings to allow time to think, relax, have a drink, visit the toilet, make notes, check emails.
8. Colour code your diary. Use different colours for different types of tasks so you can see at a glance what your day ahead consists of. You could even use colour psychology, so red for client meetings that shouldn’t be moved, green for client work, blue for down time, yellow for fun/family stuff etc.
9. Consider using an appointment management system such as Calendly which enables people to choose a time from your calendar. You can link the tool to your Gmail or Outlook so that it only offers times when you are available. You can also build in buffers for travelling or downtime between meetings.

Tips for email management

It’s all too easy for your inbox to get out of control quickly. Why not try managing your emails using these ideas?

Incoming emails

1. Aim to deal with incoming emails within 24 hours to prevent your inbox becoming unmanageable.
2. Read and manage incoming emails three times a day - first thing in the morning, at lunchtime and last thing in the afternoon. This practice improves productivity as you aren’t constantly distracted by emails arriving. Turn off notifications for incoming mails if you are easily distracted.
3. Set up rules to deal with emails as they arrive. In Gmail, you can set up filters which enable you to sort and store emails in a different view outside of the inbox. In Outlook, you can set up a folder structure and create rules to move mails into the correct folder based on who sent them, what topic they cover and so on.
4. In Gmail, you can set labels to categorise emails and each email can have multiple labels to enable you to search and find them in different ways. E.g. you might use a client label, a project label and a product label.
5. You can use flags in Outlook or labels in Gmail to identify emails that need urgent attention. Be careful not to use the flags too often because if everything is flagged, it doesn’t help you to prioritise.
6. It is also possible to colour code emails in Outlook by setting up a conditional rule which changes the text colour if the conditions are met, for example if it comes from a certain email address or the subject contains a certain word.
7. Identify spam emails and subscriptions/newsletters that you don’t read and unsubscribe from them. Aim to do this regularly once a month to keep your inbox clutter-free.
8. Have a one touch approach - Read and action, read and delete, read and file or simply delete (these are the ones to unsubscribe from).
9. If the email will take no more than one minute to reply, do it immediately and then file it away. Implementing this email management tip can help prevent your inbox getting clogged up with items that could quickly be dealt with.
10. Keep a folder or label for emails that are outstanding for action. Review and empty this folder regularly or keep outstanding for action in your inbox. Aim for zero unread emails in your inbox at the end of the day.

Outgoing emails

1. Set aside specific times to write and send emails.
2. File emails according to your system (folders, labels, flags) as soon as you’ve sent it so you don’t have to trawl through your entire sent box when you need to refer back to a communication you’ve had.
3. Create templates for common interactions you have with clients or colleagues. For example, when you are onboarding a new client, when you are responding to frequently asked questions and when you are sending out paperwork such as invoices, contracts and proposals. Templates can save you lots of time - why type the same thing over and over when you can pull up a template instead?
4. Set an out of office message to be sent when you are unable to access and respond to your messages. A holding statement is good enough so that people know why there is a delay in communication. Manage people’s expectations.
5. There may be times when you want to email a client whilst your head is in the right place to respond but you don’t want to send the email immediately. Perhaps you don’t want the client to know that you are reading emails in the evening or at weekends. Use the schedule function to set a future time for the email to be sent.

If you are finding it hard to keep on top of your messages and yourcalendar and time isn’t well organised, you could consider getting a VA to help with email and diary management. Get in touch on or phone me on 07932 040454 for a no-obligation chat about how I can help.

I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn so please send me a request.

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