• Emails • Phone • Meetings

The increase in productivity from investing a small amount of time in efficiently managing these activities upfront is more than worth result.

EMAIL MANAGEMENT

Keeping up with daily onslaught of emails is a major challenge for most of us, both personally & professionally. The following tips will help you manage daily flow of emails:

• Create an electronic filing cabinet, much like physical cabinets you have, with electronic folders for category names

• Once emails have been read and responded to (if an action is required), move email from your inbox to your storage folders. This makes it easy to track which emails still need an action. Many companies impose limits on “inbox” size. By moving your mail out of your inbox to a personal folder, an added benefit is that restriction on size will not interrupt your day at precisely moment you need to send an email.

• If your email program includes previous email content for that email string when replying, be sure to delete earlier versions of string to avoid redundant emails filed. This makes it much easier to find latest copy in string when searching later.

• If your email has an attachment file, detach and save it as a file in your electronic filing system for future reference, so you won’t have to go searching through your emails to find file later. Relying on email subject headings can create a time consuming search for file later.

• If you frequently send same type of email, save a copy as a draft or template that you can reuse over & over (changing specifics such as name, date and amount for each email)

• If a document is available electronically, but you refer to it frequently, print it and keep it in a hanging file or on your desktop.

• Every 6 months or so, go through your folders and delete emails no longer needed. This will save disk space and make your searches more streamlined.

PHONE MANAGEMENT

That doesn’t mean you should put candles away, but start setting mood early by reveling in your relationship. Here are five ideas to get you started.

1. Explore uncharted territory Intimacy is a key ingredient for creating a romantic mood. In its most basic sense, intimacy is about revealing our interior selves to another person—the part of ourselves that we normally hide from others. When we do this, we honor other person as someone we cherish and trust. Since it’s often difficult to start sharing in this way, a game or book of questions can help. The classic game of relationship questions is Ungame, while classic questions book is (appropriately enough) The Book of Questions by Gregory Stock. Each of these products contains hundreds of questions on topics ranging from ethics (“What would you do if . . . ?”) to feelings and ideas. These are just two of many similar products that you can use in almost any setting—even in car or airplane on way to your honeymoon destination.