E-mail

Email is something that I use on a daily basis and have been using on a daily basis for over ten years now. It is essential to both my work life and my private life. I would confidently say that around 70% of my career is managed via email, and around 50% of my personal life. Even more so since the pandemic.

I heavily rely on email, don’t we all? I am sent emails to remind me to pay my bills, renew my car insurance, book my MOT, take a gas or electricity meter reading. My house insurance, boiler insurance, phone insurance and car insurance documents are sent to me via email. My children’s activity schedules and information are emailed, my sons nursery send all information via email. There is no aspect of my life that does not involve email. All communication relating to my work is via email, phone calls are becoming a ting of the past.

Junk and Spam really are a pet peeve of mine, when I open my inbox to 70+ emails I probably delete 30 or so junk mails before I even start to process the rest. This is tiresome and time consuming.

Since reading the article highlighted in Thing 14; I have blocked senders and filtered my inbox in an attempt to reduce the overbearing junk mail as much as possible. I look forward to the positive effect this has!

Then I read the information about folders. Oh my. I was in my element. I think I lost around 3 hours of my day sorting my emails into folders dating right back to 2015. I created a folder for my eldest son, this now holds his payslips as well as any other correspondence addressed to him in one folder so I don’t have to scroll through endless pages to find something he’s looking for. I have one for all of my insurance correspondence which will be a godsend! I can barely remember who I have my car insurance with from one year to the next without having to search through my emails to find out. So now I have sub folders in my insurance folder which separates old car insurance policies from the current one as well as house insurance, phone insurance, boiler insurance and life insurance! It’s so organised I love it.

I have a folder for my youngest son which holds all correspondence from his nursery and his out of school classes.

I have an online learning folder which holds all of my open badge emails, a receipt folder for all my payment confirmations for bills and a work one which has countless sub folders to make my life so much easier. I was so impressed with how easy it was that I scolded myself for never exploring the option before now.

I had no system for managing my emails before this, I would delete the ones that were unimportant and the rest were left in my inbox, it was not an effective way to organise them and made searching for specific information difficult. Now I can find what I’m looking for in no time, it is so organised and highly effective.

Using the BCC function is something I have ignored previous to this, but now that I have read about it, I have realised that it is something that would actually make my working life much easier. Often times I have to send the same email to numerous people but I have never wanted to group send for fear of breaching confidentiality by sharing email addresses. Now that I know that when using Bcc, the recipients are unaware of the other email addresses then it will make sending multiple emails much easier. This way, I can send the same information to service users relatives without fear of breaching confidentiality of contact details.

All in all, I am thoroughly impressed with my new knowledge on email and I look forward to putting it to good use and making my professional life much easier. 

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