Sending and receiving E-mail is becoming commonplace in today’s business, but is E-mail making your work life easier or more difficult? Many people would answer a resounding BOTH! The reason? Along with the ease of sending off a quick E-mail, comes an abundance of junk E-mail we must sort through.

If each of your 10 employees receives 15 junk E-mail messages per week, it would take about two hours per week to sort through them...upwards of eight hours each month, 96 hours per year! These lost hours translate into lost dollars over the course of a year for the small business, making junk Email a critical and costly problem.

Filter Out the Junk
Some programs allow you to filter out much of the junk E-mail you receive. Enabling this on a company-wide level will catch most of these E-mail messages. For example, the Organize tool (select the Organize icon while in the Inbox view) in Microsoft® Outlook® can automatically move junk E-mail to a separate location or delete it altogether. A text file of the exact filter terms is installed by default in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office.

Stop the Junk
You can eliminate quite a bit of junk mail from ever getting to your inbox by using a free E-mail address to do most of your web surfing (i.e. requesting information from websites, posting messages in newsgroups, chat rooms, etc.). By using a separate free E-mail address for public postings, you can keep your main account relatively junkfree. When you begin receiving junk E-mail in your free account, just close down the account and open a new account. Some free E-mail services include Yahoo!, Excite, Hot Mail and Juno.

Prioritize What You Read
Do you give your E-mail too much priority? Just like phone messages, not every E-mail requires an immediate response. Save the jokes and personal correspondence for later to concentrate on business now.

Faster Communications
Do you have to communicate with someone who never lets you off the phone? Using E-mail can make you more productive. Get the answers you need without wasting time on the phone. The average phone call takes about 12 minutes; an E-mail takes one minute. If you replace 10 calls a week with Email, you’ll save nearly two hours a week! Many programs, such as Microsoft ® Outlook®, can be set up to handle internal E-mail. Using internal E-mail can help eliminate those tiny pieces of paper everywhere and avoid lost phone messages. Try some of these techniques today and watch your productivity grow!

Christine Sundberg is president of
Bayhill Computer Care, which performs
diagnosis, maintenance and installation
of computer equipment for small businesses.
She can be reached at 264- 9049 or
csundberg@bayhillinc.com.