• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Training for Translators

Online courses for translators and interpreters

  • Blog
  • Classes for translators
    • Consulting
  • Resources for translators
    • Translate HSFT!
  • About/Contact
    • Privacy Policy
  • Cart

Mar 07 2016

Thoughts on managing your e-mail

In the age of Information Overload, it seems to get harder and harder to maintain any semblance of control over the volumes of e-mail we receive. But, there’s hope, and there are strategies…let’s take a look at a few, and feel free to add your own in the comments.

Let’s start with e-mail management techniques I use and find helpful

  • Mercilessly unsubscribe and filter. I have trouble ignoring an e-mail once it lands in my Inbox, so I need technology to help me prioritize. My goal: limit the Inbox to time-sensitive messages. So, as soon as I get added to a mailing list I don’t want to be on, I unsubscribe. Right then, without guilt. Perhaps more importantly, I set up filters to send non-time-sensitive e-mail to somewhere other than my Inbox. For example I don’t want to unsubscribe from my neighborhood e-mail list, or my ATA division e-mail lists, but I don’t necessarily want to read those messages the second they come in. So I set up a “skip the Inbox” filter to immediately put those e-mails in specially-labeled folders. This saves a ton of time and distractions.
  • Shut off as many notifications as you can. If you’re present on social media sites, you are likely to get a lot of notifications from them: someone followed you on Twitter, someone replied to your Facebook post, someone on LinkedIn has a work anniversary, etc. These sites (especially LinkedIn, in my experience) generate so many notifications that it’s worth spending 10 minutes to dig into the Settings labyrinth and shut them off.
  • Make peace with brevity. I’m a wordy person. I talk a lot, I write a lot. But between my own translation work, my teaching and consulting work and my ATA-related work, I get a ton of e-mail. I’ve forced myself to accept that a polite but very brief response (“Great! Thank you so much for letting me know.” “Wednesday at 1 PM works best for me; talk to you then.” “I’m not interested in this right now, but thanks for thinking of me!”) is OK. I’d like to say more, but this kind of response does the trick in a pinch.
  • Accept that reading and answering e-mail takes a lot of your time. When I started freelancing 13 years go, “let me just clear out the Inbox before I shut down for the day” was still an option. But that option (for me, and I’m guessing for many of you) is long gone. When I do a little benchmarking to find out how long I spend on various work-related tasks, I find that I spend one to two hours reading and answering e-mail on an average day. Of course, some of this involves actually doing work over e-mail–for example critiquing a student’s resume and cover e-mail. But the point being that even on a day when I “just take care of e-mail,” that’s a good number of hours.
  • Hit the low-hanging fruit first. When I open my Inbox on an average morning, I have probably 15-30 unread e-mails waiting (and that’s the time-sensitive ones that make it into my Inbox; not marketing stuff or e-newsletters). By scanning the preview lines, I can tell which ones can be knocked off with a quick response (pick a meeting time, how much do you charge to translate a marriage certificate, where is the 2018 ATA conference). So I do those first, then go back to the ones that require more thought.
  • Don’t let e-mail rule you, but don’t let it get away from you either. I try not to be enslaved to my e-mail; I don’t think that someone’s going to die if they don’t get a response from me within five minutes. I have a smartphone but I don’t spend a ton of time answering e-mail when I’m not actually working. However, failing to respond to e-mail generates more e-mail (did you get my message, we’re waiting on you to schedule the meeting, should I ask another translator to work on this if you’re too busy). So in a way, letting e-mail pile up can exponentially increase the amount of time it takes to manage it.

Now let’s move on to e-mail management techniques I don’t use, but that I think are a good idea

  • Only answer e-mail at set times. The top of the hour, four times a day, etc. If you work on long-deadline projects like books, this could be a great idea.
  • Have totally separate work and personal e-mail addresses. Only check the work e-mail during the work day, only check personal at night and on weekends. I just find that my work and personal friends are so commingled that this doesn’t work.
  • Practice a one-touch rule. Once you open an e-mail, don’t close it and let it sit there: respond to it, delete it, file it, or mark it as unread. I like to mull things over, so this doesn’t really work for me, but it’s certainly efficient.
  • Create an auto-responder that eliminates the expectation of an immediate response. I recently e-mailed someone whose auto-response basically says “I’ve received your message and I’ll get back to you within the next few days. If this is really urgent, call me.” Personally I don’t have the guts to do that, but I thought it was an interesting technique!
  • Purge e-mail more than a month (two months, etc.) old. Another technique I don’t have the guts for but ultimately kind of admire; if someone’s e-mail has sat in your inbox for six weeks, a) you’ll probably never respond, or b) it’s probably no longer relevant, or c) the sender probably forgot about it. Pick a date, click the tickbox next to every message older than that, and get rid of them. The blackbelt form of this would be “e-mail bankruptcy,” where you delete everything and start from zero. If you’re in really dire e-mail straits (I recently talked to someone whose Inbox contains over a thousand unread e-mails), a radical step like this is worth some thoughts.
  • Have an e-mail-free portion of your day. I can’t do this in the morning because I’m already eight hours behind my French and Swiss clients, but sometimes I do it in the afternoon when most of my clients are already out of the office. Shut down your e-mail and just work for two hours, and watch how much you get done.

Readers, over to you!

Written by Corinne McKay · Categorized: Freelancing, Productivity · Tagged: e-mail, e-mail management, e-mail management for freelancers

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. ciclistatraduttore says

    March 7, 2016 at 10:48 pm

    I don’t want to close all notifications — some of them I do want to see. On the other hand, I have a ruthless and lightning-fast delete key. I scan the inbox headers quickly and tick off all the ones that I won’t even open. Delete. Then I deal with the survivors.
    Another idea comes from Gmail, and I don’t know how or why, because I did not set it up. Gmail sorts the incoming into Primary (AKA Inbox), Social (stuff with domain names from social media), and Promotions (mail generated by those marketing list companies). I like that, because I don’t even look at Social or Promotion until I am taking a break from work. Work-related mail all ends up in Primary anyway.

    Reply
    • Corinne McKay says

      March 8, 2016 at 3:44 pm

      Thanks Jonathan! Yes, I love that feature in Gmail too; then you can keep the interesting but not critical stuff for coffee break time!

      Reply
  2. alchymie2013 says

    March 7, 2016 at 11:27 pm

    Plenty of food-for-thought :).
    Thanks!!

    Reply
    • Corinne McKay says

      March 8, 2016 at 3:44 pm

      Glad you enjoyed it!

      Reply
  3. Carmen Febres-Cordero says

    March 8, 2016 at 11:53 am

    Hi Corinne,
    I found a little app called “unroll me” which allows you to mass unsubscribe. You can set several emails in the app. I used it for my yahoo account.

    Reply
    • Corinne McKay says

      March 8, 2016 at 3:43 pm

      Thanks Carmen! That sounds helpful!

      Reply
  4. Kylie says

    March 8, 2016 at 7:44 pm

    I already feel my stress levels going down, just thinking about implementing these techniques. *sigh of relief*

    Reply
    • Corinne McKay says

      March 8, 2016 at 8:35 pm

      Thanks Kylie, glad the tips were helpful!

      Reply
  5. Maria - Transpanish says

    March 16, 2016 at 2:07 am

    Great tips but not sure about the auto-responder unless you are on holidays or you are not able to check your emails for several days. Maybe this could work for some specific email addresses, for instance, if you have one email for receiving quote requests.

    Reply
  6. Cărți și călătorii says

    March 16, 2016 at 8:04 am

    Good list! As I can’t stand to have unread emails in my box, I tend to check them out and deal with them as soon as I see them, which can be time-consuming. Fortunately, this helps not letting them ”pile up” and maybe miss something important.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Become a better translator: join our mailing list!

Learn from our blog:

  • Speaking of Translation: Self-care and mental health in the pandemic
  • Interview with Oliver Dirs, author of Good Words Fast
  • March Marketing Madness starts Monday
  • The Translator’s Little Book of Poetry
  • Upcoming online courses for translators
  • Guest post: Join the educational interpreting movement!
  • Marketing to direct clients using a touch point system
  • Medical terminology and Online presence roadmap: Classes start Monday!

The original career how-to guide for freelance translators. Over 12,000 copies sold!

Search the Training for Translators blog

Copyright © 2021 · Training For Translators · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're OK with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. To view this website's privacy policy, click About>Privacy Policy. Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Non-necessary

Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.

SAVE & ACCEPT