Email management is an essential tool for lawyers. It has transformed the way we do business.

If used excessively, it can take over our day and crush productivity. Workers spend over two hours per day on their emails. Legal professionals are under a heavier burden because email dominates communications, and therefore the time required to sort through them.

You may be one of those who receives hundreds of emails daily. This volume of communication is unsustainable and almost impossible to manage. Inbox backlogs can be frustrating and stressful.

How can professionals in the “knowledge economy,” like paralegals and attorneys, take control of their email? Here are some tips on managing your email in One Legal for lawyers.

You should only check your emails during specific periods

It’s common to argue that scheduling time for all is the best way to accomplish things. It’s important to schedule time for everything, including checking your email and responding.

Schedule dedicated time slots. Dedicate specific blocks of time throughout the day for email management. Decide on the frequency and duration of your email management based on workload and personal preferences. You should check your emails 30 minutes each morning, 30 after lunch, and 30 before the end of the day.

Tell clients and colleagues about your availability: Let your clients, co-workers, and staff know your availability. To manage expectations, you should clearly communicate to clients and colleagues that you are available to respond to their emails within those time frames.

Disable real-time email notifications: Turn them off or put them on silent mode during the designated email management blocks. Constant interruptions from email can interrupt your workflow, making it hard to focus on other tasks.

Avoid multitasking and stay focused: Focus solely on emails during the time allotted for email. Avoid switching between activities or multitasking. You should give your full attention to managing, organizing, and managing your email inbox. This includes reading, responding, and organizing.

Systematically manage emails. Plan your time to process emails. Prioritize the most important or urgent emails and then move on to the others. Delegate or defer urgent messages, and respond promptly to time-sensitive ones. By the end of every time block, you should aim to reduce your inbox to a manageable size or clear it.

Email management techniques: Implement effective email management strategies, such as Inbox Zero, folder categorization or time-blocking. Prioritize emails and organize them into folders or labels. Take action quickly (replying, forwarding, archiving, deleting) by putting them in the appropriate folders.

Adjust your time blocks as necessary: Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of designated email time slots. Consider adjusting your schedule if you notice that certain timeslots are flooded with emails or need more time to manage email.

Set time blocks to manage emails. This will help you maximize productivity and minimize distractions. By focusing on email management, lawyers can be more efficient, ensure prompt responses and maintain their organization.

You can read your emails in a systematic way

Many systems exist to deal with the inbox overflow and focus on important messages.

It would be best if you quickly read through your emails. Delete unnecessary items (like receipts for calendar requests, for instance), answer quick questions which take less than two minutes, and mark messages that require more time as separate tasks to be addressed later.

It’s a shame that the tasks feature in Outlook is so underused. It can help you avoid embarrassing situations like being asked by your boss about an email you forgot about and then having to dig it out of the bottom part of your inbox. Creating tasks from emails is easy — click on the flag column and set due and reminder dates.

Set rules for essential messages

You’ll want to be notified of important emails as soon as possible if you use the methods described above. It can be beneficial to have messages from One Legal, for example, alerting you about the status of your order, or a notification service, like Fetch, updating you on your case, sent into a high-importance folder.

You can use rules to do the opposite: you can weed out emails that are not important, like newsletters if you direct them to a folder you can access when you have some time.