A Salesforce consultant needs to manage their inbox well. With emails originating from clients, internal team members, and perhaps mixed with some personal emails, having a simple but efficient system can really help keep you organized.
Here are some helpful guidelines
1. Use labels.
The first step in organizing your inbox is creating a number of labels. These can include “Clients”, “Employer”, “Notifications”, “Transactions”, “Salesforce”, “Personal”, “Archive”, etc. Be sure to find the right level of granularity so you don’t have dozens and dozens of labels.
You can also create a sub-label under “Clients” for each client.
2. Have rules to auto organize as much as possible.
If you’re signed up to a newsletter, consider creating a filter to automatically add a label and archive it. This way you can read it at your leisure and it skips the inbox completely.
Some emails may need your immediate attention, so create a rule to tag it, but leave it in your inbox until you’ve read it.
And some emails don’t need your attention at all (like Salesforce sandbox errors, lol). Those can be immediately deleted instead of archived.
3. Manage task-related emails.
Once you’ve read an email, if it contains a task that you can do in 5 minutes or less, just do it.
If not, create a task in your todo app (I use TickTick) and copy a link to the email into the task. You can then set a due date and archive the email. This way all your tasks are contained in your todo app instead of in your emails.
The takeaway
Having zero emails in your inbox is not a myth. With decent time management skills, you can achieve this wonderfully light feeling.