Productivity tools to make you love email again

I​f you’re like most professionals, you probably spend a large proportion of your time emailing. Whether it’s sending documents, delegating tasks, exchanging information or arranging meetings; though important, these tasks can really take away time that could be spent on more meaningful work tasks.

According to researchers from Carleton University, people spend around one-third of their time in the office reading and replying to emails. This amounts to 11.7 hours per week, with 30 percent of this time spent on emails that are neither urgent or important.

While emails are the bane of many of our lives, it cannot be denied that this tool has revolutionized our productivity in the professional setting. Yet, what if we could improve our email productivity, putting more time aside to spend on more productive tasks?

Fortunately, there are a number of external productivity tools available to make you fall back in love with email.

1. Gmail Metrics

Gmail Metrics is an analytics tool for your email which enables you to see how you’re actually using your email. It provides data on things like how long it takes you to respond to emails; the number of emails you send and receive by day of the week and time of day; your most popular contacts; average email word counts; as well as many other interesting features.

Having this data provided to you on a plate will enable you to see where you are losing the most time throughout the day, and thus how to make up for it.

2. Sanebox

This handy tool basically manages your email inbox using automation processes. With every email that flies into your inbox, Sanebox decides if they are important or not. If decided as important, then they will stay put in your inbox, and if not, they are put into a ‘SaneLater’ folder.

But how are these decisions made? The tool uses your past interactions on email to make future decisions. For instance, if you often open email from a particular person soon after you received it, the system will mark this person as important.

Fortunately, if you come across emails in your ‘SaneLater’ folder that are actually important, then you can simply drag it back into your inbox, where it will appear from then on.

This tool will save you a whole lot of time as you’ll have a lot less irrelevant emails clogging up your inbox.

3. UnrollMe

Ever wondered how many hours of the day you have wasted wading through a mountain of marketing emails, newsletters, and other irrelevant content? While UnrollMe cannot tell you how much time you waste doing this, it can tell you what email lists you are currently subscribed to, giving you the opportunity to cut ties from them. This tool is free and could potentially save you a whole lot of time.

4. Boomerang

What is brilliant about this tool is the ability to schedule emails. Whether it’s communicating with people in different time zones, scheduling an email to be sent at a time you believe it will most likely be read, or writing emails when you are free and then scheduling them to be sent at a more appropriate time. Boomerang epitomizes organization!

5. EasyEmail

A talent team filled with IT and Harvard affiliates have built an AI-powered email productivity tool that can help you draft your emails quicker. For many of us, we spend a whole lot of time answering almost identical questions from different senders. Wouldn’t it be easier to have a response automatically suggested to you based on your previous email content?

As you’re drafting an email, EasyEmail evaluates the content of the email you are replying to and then suggests phrases or sentences to help complete your email. This feature is much like predictive text and can reclaim you a lot of precious time lost over email sending.