A lot of the email that hits our inbox every day is relating to tasks to, you know, things you're supposed to do things you're supposed to accomplish. But the problem is that email actually sucks for delegating. It's really bad. Because when you get an email, there's usually no due date, no priority level. We've already talked about the subject line problem. All the emails, files and comments aren't in one place, you need to go back through 10 or 15 different emails to try to find everything and you can't see the status of all of your tasks at a glance.
This is why I highly recommend that you have a good quality task management system that you use instead of email and that you always assign the tasks within the task management system instead of the email. You ask for updates within the task management system. Everything should be there you'll find it will save you a ton of time. There's also ways to make both of them work together. This is a great little plugin for Gmail and chrome that works with a task management system called teamwork projects, which is one of my favorite ones to use. And what it lets me do is I can take an email within Gmail, click on a teamwork button that shows up right in Gmail.
And then I can add a task to any of my projects and tasks list, and it will include a link back to that current email. So if I want to see what was written in the original email, I can, I can choose who to assign it to. I can assign priority dates start and end dates, and I can also choose to notify by somebody by email if they're not within our task management system. This tool saves me a lot of time every day because I can effectively turn emails into tasks. So please reconsider using email for your task management. assignments and start looking into a good quality task management system.
I highly recommend teamwork projects. It's the one I settled on after weeks of testing. But certainly there's other good ones out there like Asana and Basecamp and Trello. And if you embrace any of those and work with them, you'll find that will work much better than email for delegating tasks. So this gets rid of a lot of those emails from your inbox because you're no longer getting the task emails. That will cut it down a lot.
So let's go on to the next way to reduce emails coming into your inbox.