Managing Your Email
Dos and Don’ts for Effective Email Management
Do: Get in the habit of checking your email at least once a day. This will help prevent your inbox from getting cluttered, which could make you miss important notifications. You can choose to check in anytime that works best for you, but try to stay consistent so you don’t forget.
Don’t: Use your school email address to register for non-academic subscriptions.
Keeping your Stanford email free of spam is a great way to ensure that the emails you receive are relevant to your work. Remember that you can always keep another non-academic email account to manage these promotions.
Do: Try to estimate how long a response would take you.
If you could easily reply within one or two minutes, try to respond immediately to avoid pile-up!
Don’t: Feel the need to open or respond to every email the second you receive it.
Prioritization is your friend, and you don’t want email to become a distraction or a source of procrastination. Use context clues to help determine how important a response is; look for RSVP dates in the subject line or email body that might indicate urgency, and consider who the email is from. For instance, you should probably prioritize a message from your professor over a general event announcement.
Do: Create separate calendar tags.
When you add events from your email, tags will allow you to easily organize them into categories, such as “important,” “semi-important,” “for fun” or “topic” (health, school, work, research, etc.).
Don’t: Keep unnecessary events on your calendar that aren’t directly related to your schedule.
This includes events you don’t actually plan on attending or those that have been canceled. These events will just fill your calendar up and make it hard to visualize and sort through important events.
Do: Sync your calendar between platforms.
If you keep a Google calendar, add it to your student Outlook account by opening your calendar in Outlook, clicking “Add Calendar” on the left-hand sidebar, and adding your Google account to your personal calendars. You can also sync your Canvas calendars with your Google calendar or Outlook calendar.
Don’t: Stay on mailing lists that no longer serve you.
These tend to clutter up your inbox and push important emails down.
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Managing Your Email
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