Email is often a huge source of distraction when you are trying to get things done.  Have you ever noticed that your email in box and your spam accounts are overloaded with emails on a daily, weekly and monthly basis?  A lot of time is often wasted and spent on reading emails, replying to emails and deleting emails.  God wants to help you to become better able to deal with the stress of handling overloaded emails accounts.

How do you deal with having the flood of emails in your in box everyday? Not to mention the same mails that may also invading your blackberry or your iphone?

Research tells us that the average office worker spends about 49 minutes every day managing their email while  more senior staff can spend up to 4 hours a day processing their In Boxes. There is just so many emails coming in on a daily basis and employees and home entrepreneurs are plagued by “email stress”.

God wants to help DE-stress your life and managing your email accounts is one of those ways that He can help you manage your time,  it’s like keeping a clean desk.  The UN-cluttering of your email accounts will clear the your mind for more creative work. A clean email box will also reduces your work place  and home life stress.

So to help you better manage the volume of mails you get on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, consider using the following tips:

Communicate Expectation – There is usually not an urgent need to respond to email – a 48 hour turnaround time is quite acceptable. And if you are on the road or traveling set up an auto responder that communicate that to your reader that you are unavailable, they will understand if you are not able to respond within 48 hours.

Turn off e-mail alerts – check emails at regularly set times.  Breaking your chain of thought every time an email comes in will disrupt your concentration and creativity. When you need to get some work done, turn off your emails. You can attend to the mails when you have completed your work.  Multitasking  kills productivity.

This way you are focus and not needing to tune in and out constantly, disrupting your thoughts and exhausting yourself in the process. This is the most inefficient use of your time and resources.  How many times do you switch between what you are doing and check on emails? That much time and energy is wasted daily.

And if you are not comfortable with this rule then send out a broadcast and announce your new policy, that you will only check mails x times a day and thank your readers for their understanding and patience. This is not an excuse not to respond to mail but it helps to relieve you of the need to drop everything you are working on just to respond immediately.  This alone will increase your productivity and reduce your stress.

Get Organized – make use of filters and rules to help you keep your in box lean and clean.

Create rules and send spam straight to the trash without it even appearing in your in box.

You can also create folders/labels and have mails automatically delivered into the respective folders so you can read or process these unimportant mails on the weekends.  If you feel stress when you see many emails unattended to in your in box, then clear out the clutter and create some space. Keep your in box nice and clean and empty your trash at the end of every day.

Processed emails once – as far as it is possible, process urgent emails when you read them and file others away to be followed up or delegated. Read and process or delete or file.

Unsubscribe from any list that you are no longer using. Or set up rules to send them to your folders for follow up. You can have “to check out” folders.

If you have too many email accounts – consolidate. Either forward all accounts to one main account or cancel off the extra accounts. All you need is one personal account and one business account. And you will want to keep these for separate mails.

If you use some of these tips or all of these tips, you will begin to experience a lot less stress, you will become more focused and you will have more time to spend with God and more time to do the things that God has created you to do rather than using your time to read, reply, and delete emails. So what are you waiting for? Work with God and allow Him to help you manage your email stress!

Do you want to Invite God to help you manage your email stress? If so, join us in this simple prayer;

Dear God,
Thank you for kindly reminding me that I need to better manage my time and get a handle on my email overload. I invite you to come into my circumstances and help me develop a system and the discipline necessary to better manage my time and all of my email account. Help me use the additional free time that I will have gained when I do this to focus on you and the things that you have created me to do, rather than waste the precious time you’ve given me distracted by emails, in Jesus’ name I ask and pray – Amen!