3 Email Productivity Hacks for Apple Mail Users | Ep. 62 | Business Podcast
Summary
Email is one of those things we have a love-hate relationship. It’s a fact of life in the business world and it’s not going away any time soon.
I’ve tried maybe a hundred different approaches on how to deal with my inbox.
In this episode I lay out my three best email productivity hacks for Apple mail users.
Gmail users, don’t feel left out. I have productivity hacks coming for you as well.
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Hello, friends. Welcome to the show. Today I’ve got three email hacks that I use with my Apple mail client that you can put into action to increase your productivity. I’m not gonna waste another second. Let’s get to it. Alright, Today’s show is for anyone who uses an apple computer and Apple mail. I will do a podcast on Gmail hacks to increase your productivity. But today I’m going to cover what I do in Apple mail that has greatly increased my ability to manage my email number.
One is I put faces and logo’s in the contacts in the in box, and what that allows me to do is very quickly see who the email is from, and see new emails that I might not recognize and see the people that are closest to me or that I’m working with currently so that I could grab those emails. Now. What does that mean? If in Apple mail you can have an icon show for each of the emails, and what I do is I used my contacts, and in my contacts I put the person’s picture, which I usually grab from linked in or another source or the logo. So what does that mean?
So I have a contact for Amazon, and I collect all of the emails that Amazon ever sends me the email addresses, and I put it in the Amazon contact. And then I upload the Amazon logo. So whenever an Amazon email comes from any of the emails that they send me emails from whether that’s an Amazon order or an Amazon shipping update or an Amazon refund, whatever that is, I know it’s from Amazon very quickly. If one of the people from our team send me an email, I see their face and human’s recognize faces something like 100 times quicker than text. And in fact, humans recognize pictures and shapes faster than text. So you very quickly do that. If my e a extraordinary JIA sends me an email, I see her face and I know instantly to go to that out of the today. I had Oh, gosh, I don’t know, 120 emails come in, and but I could very quickly pick these out, and I can see new emails that I’m probably not going to pay attention to right away.
Now it does take a minute to create these contacts and upload the picture. But it’s really short and the r. O. I on doing that is huge. So that’s hack number one. Put faces in your contacts with the faces. Show up in your email list. Hack number two is I don’t delete any email And here’s what I’ve found. I’ve tried everything under the sun. I’ve been using email since Ooh, 19 86. Well, I think that was my first year in college. Was it? No, that was high school. I’m not that old. It was When was it? 1990? I think. Class of 92 or 90? Yeah, that was May High School and I’ve tried everything I’ve tried spending. I know some people try to create all these folders and state organized. What I found is easier is just leave it all in the in box and use the search if you actually need to find something And that way you have to go through the folders because in what I found is two years will go by and I can’t remember what my filing system waas. Now, some of you who are listening maybe extraordinarily good at staying organized and just being obsessive about it, and I would consider myself a very organized person. But I don’t fall into that five standard deviations from the norm. I’m probably two standard deviations from the norm as it relates to be an organized, and even then you you’re gonna fail and then you get behind and then it just turns into a show. And then your anxiety goes up, your stress level goes up and there’s been this proliferation of crazy productivity. People out there who have I profit ties to the fact that you should have zero inbox. I think it’s the exact opposite.
Zero inbox causes stress and anxiety, and you rushing to your inbox all the time. I never feel any anxiety. I know. I’m not gonna. It’s just gonna fill up. I delete emails if they’re not relevant. But I leave them all in one place because then at least I know they’re in one place. And if you use hack number one and you have everybody’s faces, it makes it even easier to search. So hack number two is don’t don’t try this almost impossible feat to have zero inbox, that’s it’s almost impossible and hack Number three is I use subscriptions and rules, and that’s under preferences in your apple mail and then rules and I create rules for all my newsletters. And I put all the newsletters in one place or notifications. If you have linked in, you probably get oh so on such don’t send you a message. And now that everybody is using bots, the market to you on LinkedIn you get like 100 of them, and I and sometimes I do wanna be alerted, but I don’t want it clouding my main inbox. So I make a role. It says, Put it in subscriptions and alerts. And then I do check there every day. But at least I know where all that is. And I’ve created rules for different things, and I also use colors, so I’ll use a color that says, Hey, this is one of the subscriptions that I that I really am interested in so color that green and it and it turns green so you will find that under male preferences and then rules and you could make all sorts of rules.
You can do it by subject. You could actually do it by a word in the subject. You could do it by something in the body, whatever that is. You could do that. And and the same thing that I did an act. Number one. I have the logos for these newsletters or subscriptions. I have that show up in the folder, so I can very quickly navigate to those folders. So those are the three hacks I have for you for Apple mail. I will do another episode on some email hacks for Gmail. Most all three of these you can use for Gmail as well. It’s just a little bit different implementation. So again, hack number one put faces in your contacts and turn that on in your email so that you can very quickly see who emails air from number two is Do not do zero inbox do all box. Just leave it in there and search for it when you need it. So that you don’t have this crazy stress level that at the end of day you’re like, Oh, my God. I got 10 emails I gotta get I gotta get him. We gotta get him. Just like this is never ending. And I tried it. It will kill you. My wife tried it. It killed her. So and the other way, just less stressful. And that way, at least. If you don’t get to it, there’s not this Oh my God! To get get to zero inbox and then number three use rules to create rules to catch different types of things.
Again, I use subscriptions and notifications. Put those into action, increase your productivity, lower your stress and make email aim or pleasant experience. And thank you friends for tuning into the show. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate review. We want to hear from you and subscribe so you don’t miss any of our weekly episodes until the next time. Remember, you are just one business plan away. I’m rooting for your success. We’ll see you soon.
