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Why You Should Keep Emails Short
“This could change your inbox forever.” To just say “keep your emails short” really isn’t specific enough for you to actually follow this piece of inbox management advice. Instead we invite you to the 5 sentence email challenge, meaning emails you compose or reply to should not be more than 5 sentences long. Free up more time in your work day to stay productive, improve how you communicate, while influencing better and less frequent emails in your inbox. In our last Blog post titled “Email, it’s not so bad.” we mention the 5 Sentence Email Rule as tip #6. This is a brilliant philosophy and takes some practice. It all falls back to how email is mismanaged today, and new thing we can do to make it much better for us. According to the August 14, 2014 post on The Atlantic, “Email is still the best thing on the internet” so let’s see how we can evolve with the fast ever-changing environment of information exchange, so it isn’t such a hassle to manage the constant influx of electronic messages flooding our inbox. 5 Sentence Email? We investigate the 5 sentence email strategy to see if it is appropriate for business email correspondence. The easy answer is, that there is no definite rule when handling new emails or when replying to emails. Simply take the time to consolidate info in your emails to 5 sentences or less. By Guy Kawasaki’s standard (the man who coined the 5 sentence email philosophy),…
Email, it’s not so bad.
Despite the heightened induced stress upon sitting down at your desk to check email, there are solutions. A lot of these productivity fixes occur with habit changes in how you manage email, but why not have an email client that is actually enjoyable to use and makes email management much more effective? What if your email client offered you the best tools so that email was actually fun, productive and didn’t cause a brain aneurysm? Step 1 – Get Mailbird Download and install Mailbird, the best email client for Windows. Don’t take our word for it, IT World and PC World both think so too. Download Now Step 2 – Watch it in Action Watch this video, so you know exactly what to expect and what to do when you launch Mailbird. You can also read about the key features in Mailbird on our blog here. Step 3 – Improve Your Email Habits, Reduce Stress Here’s the part that involves changing your email habits. Try these and make your way to experiencing a better way to email. Don’t start the day with your inbox. Instead work first on the things you have scheduled the day before, take control of what gets done in your day to stay productive by doing a little day-before planning. Your inbox shouldn’t dictate what you do in your day. Batch process emails. Set dedicated times to process emails and deal with them during that time immediately, close your email when you are…
Best Kept Email Secrets
Overwhelmed Are you someone who when you feel tired or overwhelmed with your work, you start checking emails instead? Why do we do this? It is the same reason why we start with small simple tasks rather than the tougher, more complicated ones. A lot of productivity gurus suggest starting with your most difficult or time consuming task first thing in the morning. However, this can be tough for many of us as we crave that immediate satisfaction of being able to complete things, meaning we go for the easy wins. Checking and processing emails is one of those activities. Don’t Replace Real-time Communication A common recommendation is to not check email in the morning, but to rather batch it and schedule time to process email 2-3 times throughout the day. It is important to remind ourselves that the world still goes on when we ignore emails, and to instead handle them during specific and dedicated times. This also encourages people to contact you in real-time with urgent matters. Inbox Checking Addiction However we know many of you don’t like this structure for managing emails, and prefer to constantly check email to maintain a clean inbox with no emails and by dealing with emails immediately – which is ok as long as your day is not over-taken by email. For some of us, we may not need to separate email from real work, but accept that it is a part of work and building professional relationships in the exchange of…
How To Improve Your Email Productivity
Workplace productivity is a fundamental cause of concern for many corporations. According to a recent study carried out by research firm Basex; workplace interruptions cost US businesses over $650 billion a year. A primary cause of these interruptions, and subsequent lack of workplace productivity, is inadequate organisation of emails. In 2010, a study revealed that corporate users received and sent an average of 110 emails a day, and moreover, a substantial 52% of US workers agree with the statement that; “The quality of my work suffers at times because I can’t sort through the information that I need quickly enough”. In an effort to remedy this dilemma, listed below are several processes that you can implement within your daily routine to significantly improve your email organisation. By following these measures, employees can alleviate their email-related stress, and corporations can profit from improved workplace productivity. Brevity is key If you allocate specific and concise headlines for each of your emails, you will be able to locate them more rapidly when needed. Moreover, these specific subject headings will clearly convey your intentions to email recipients, which in turn will enable them to understand your aims and reply more quickly. As Steve Jobs famously declared; “the fact is people don’t read anymore”. The likelihood is that your email recipients will simply skim read your email, so you need to ensure you have clearly outlined your purpose and objectives within the first two lines of your email. Try using bullet points or numbered formats…
The “Mark all as Read” tool
We’ve added a super handy button to the Mailbird interface since bringing POP3 support into the picture. What is awesome is that now you can manage even more email accounts from one place in Mailbird. When you first sync a POP3 email account with Mailbird, all your emails will populate your inbox for that account. Most likely, you’ve already read those newly downloaded POP3 emails and you just need to clean the old batch of emails from your inbox. You can now mark all of those emails as “read” in one go, and start with a fresh clean slate with your newly added POP3 accounts in Mailbird. Alternately, that same “Mark all as read button” unlocks an “Empty folder” option when you are in your Spam or Trash folders. Before you could still accomplish deleting all Spam and Trash emails by using Ctrl or Shift to multi-select emails and moving to Trash or Spam. Now, it’s just a little easier.
Speed Read to Inbox Zero
Hope you had a beautiful Easter this year with new beginnings, including a whole new way to manage your time with email. Starting today, you are going to increase your email productivity by at least 3x. Well how exactly would I do that, you might ask? Reading emails takes too damn long. We already spend tons of time reading, processing and sending emails. What if we could speed those basic email functions up by enabling us the ability to speed read? If you’ve been following the latest educational tech trends, speed reading with tools like Spritz and Spreeder are the latest innovation to how we consume information. Do you read emails fast enough to be successful? One size does not fit all. So of course there is a unique difference to how we read depending on what we are reading. For example reading a novel vs. reading an email are very different when looking at how text is visually organized and presented depending on the format. A novel has long paragraphs of on-going text, whereas an email can be both long and short. An email has headers, bullet points or numbering and text formatting. When you read an email you quickly want to get to the point, to the gist of the message context so you can process it efficiently and effectively. So we challenged our current means of information consumption and email productivity by asking, “How can we help people speed up the processing of emails?” Well of course…
Are you fast enough for Mailbird?
Did you know that more people are reaching full email control with Mailbird? At least 85% of people who switched to Mailbird are actually reaching Inbox Zero more often. We present you with the Mailbird Inbox Zero challenge, “Are you fast enough for Mailbird?” We challenge you to hit Inbox Zero at least once a day. This means clearing out your inbox in the most effective way possible using all the key features in Mailbird. Each day when you reach Inbox Zero in Mailbird, share it with the world via the Facebook and Twitter buttons. For many of you out there, actually tackling your email, staying productive and keeping your inbox clean is an overwhelming task. Many of you are simply too slow with managing email – which is why the Wingman feature planned for release in the 4th quarter of 2014 is going to be your key to success with email. Many of you have strayed far away from using email as an effective communication tool. Email is not your job, so stop wasting time with it. Keep that inbox clean, and get to work! For those of you who have unlocked the secret to proper email etiquette and management with the Inbox Zero philosophy, this “Are you fast enough for Mailbird?” challenge should be easy for you. We’d love to hear how you best tackle email, so help others out and give us your best email tips in the comments below. Bonus points [see details below] for those…
Connect with your friends using Mailbird and Mailbird Pro!
We love staying connected and building community around Mailbird, and because of this we decided that it would be perfect to share the love of Mailbird. You can now get the most elusive email productivity management tool ever, Mailbird Pro, for 25% off or even Free for a year. How to get your hands on this special reward for you and your friends? Simple. Once you download Mailbird from our website you can go to the Mailbird menu at the top left of the window and select ‘Invite Friends’. Once you select ‘Invite Friends’, a special window will pop up where you can simply invite friends via email to try Mailbird. If 1-4 of your friends start using Mailbird, you both get 25% off Mailbird Pro. Some of you are super community builders and networkers, and want yourself, all your friends, family and colleagues to experience that in-control feeling of Inbox Zero – simply eliminating all the stress that comes with email. Many of you are passionate about really getting work done. You are a productivity seeker. If you want the best email client for Windows, then get it for Free when 5+ of your friends use Mailbird. They are just an invite away, and they also get a sweet 25% off Mailbird Pro. What are you waiting for? Do it. Invite your friends to the innovative platform for email on Windows, Mailbird proudly brings productivity back into your life with a creative and secure email experience.
Proxy Support is Here
Were you one of those who were excited to give Mailbird a try, so you decided to install it at your office or at your college campus? Only to end up frustrated to no avail because you just couldn’t get the damn thing installed and working? As it turns out, the reason why many of you may not have been able to install and use Mailbird is due to being on an internet connection with a proxy that limits websites you can visits and software applications you can download. We had several emails from people who really wanted to, but could not install Mailbird in their office or when they were on their college campus connected to their university’s proxy WiFi connection. If you were looking to Mailbird as an alternative email solution to kick your productivity levels up a notch, whether that be productivity in your personal life, education or business, Mailbird is now an available option for you with our recent release of Proxy support. How to use Mailbird on a Proxy server? We made it as easy as possible. Mailbird will automatically use your computer’s proxy settings to connect to the network. Now you can install Mailbird and use it as your new favorite email client. If you’d like to change any Proxy settings or your proxy needs authentication, here are the simple steps: Install Mailbird from the website by either clicking Download or Buy Pro. Once Mailbird is launched click on the Mailbird drop down menu…
An Email Client Localizing and Connecting the World through Language
We are super pumped to hear Satya Nadella stepping up as Microsoft’s new CEO (and they haven’t had many). We hope to see stronger support for improved productivity tools on the Windows platform. Just as Microsoft is a very international company, as you have maybe heard before, Mailbird team is an international team from Denmark, Indonesia, Colombia and USA. We speak many different languages and are always seeking ways to improve productivity for people everywhere. Originally we were going to only develop Mailbird in English, but after we saw tons of requests and support for it in many different languages we decided to go for it. The first version of Mailbird with multi-language support has arrived thanks to all our loyal fans and contributors across the globe, you guys are the best. Bringing you the best email client for Windows. Did you know that even before the full multi-language support release, Mailbird already had spell check support for 11 languages, 12 if you count UK English as a separate language. “I have tried a lot of email clients such as Thunderbird and many others. I got stuck with Roundcube webmail and then I read about Mailbird. It has a beautiful interface and works perfectly with IMAP. But the reason why I still use Mailbird is the conversation view which saves a lot of time searching for emails. Why I want to translate Mailbird? It’s an awesome piece of software and I want to support it.” – Lars Pech, German Translator and power user for Mailbird We received lots of people who…