Email productivity hacks for accountants

My previous post explained some productivity hacks for writing. This post has three hacks to help you manage your email efficiently.

Close your mail app

Whatever app you use for your email keep it closed except for the specific times you actually want to read and reply to messages. Doing this cuts out all the notifications. 

The problem with an always-open email app is the risk that when you go to it you get sucked into reading and replying to messages when you have more important or more urgent thing to do.

I suggest you set yourself specific times when you will do your email, say 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes towards the end of the day.

If an email can be dealt with quickly, whether that is to delete it, archive it or write a short reply, do it straightaway. If an email needs a longer response, record it as a task in your todo list.

Filter your mail

Use the power of your email app to process some (most) of your messages for you. Some of the filter rules I use are:

• messages from people connected with a charity I volunteer for go into a separate folder, marked as read

• I assume that messages that are copied to me are not urgent and therefore if my name is not in the ‘To’ field then the message is marked as read and moved into a folder called “Copied to me”. I rarely look in that folder.

• any message with the word unsubscribe in it is marked as read and moved into a “Newsletter” folder. I look through them occasionally to see if there is anything I want to read.

You could do more. You could identify messages from certain people, such as your line manager, and add a colour to them so they stand out. You could send all messages with unsubscribe direct to the trash.

Each mail app will do filtering in a different way so you will need to research how to create the filtering rules for your particular app.

Search the archive

Aside from the folders above that I created as destinations for incoming messages I do not want in my Inbox but do not want to auto-archive, I have only one folder, the Archive. When I have dealt with a message I either delete it (my preference) or send it to Archive. This is also true of the messages filtered out by rules described above. 

I do not structure my folders. I rely on the mail applications search feature to find anything I need in the future. Even with 15,000 messages (I just checked), the search feature is fast and I can do it on my phone, a tablet or my computer. 

To search for a message means I need to know something about it (the sender, a keyword or phrase, a date) but that is all I need: I do not also need to know where I would have filed it. Sometimes I cannot find what I am looking for. The chances are that is because I have deleted it. I am confident that I would have fared no better if I had structured folders and at least I save the time spent creating and maintaining such folders.

Do you have any tips or hacks to share?

Let me know your productivity tips and perhaps I could include them in a future post.

Productivity hacks for accountants

This is the first of what may become a series of posts about productivity.

There are countless podcasts, articles, and blogs about productivity. I’m a listener/reader of some and I don’t think I have ever come across one specifically made or written with accountants in mind. 

Allow me to step into that gap with (my first) three tips that I think can be adopted by accountants regardless of the technology they are given to use by their organisation.

Use keyboard shortcuts

Navigating documents and spreadsheets is quicker using the arrow keys than using a mouse or trackpad. There are shortcuts for most of the popular actions such as copy (Cmd/Ctrl + C), paste (Cmd/Ctrl + V), save (Cmd/Ctrl + S), and open (Cmd/Ctrl + O). In Word the space bar combined with arrow keys highlights text faster than you can drag a mouse

You can see the shortcuts next to the items in the menus in apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You could also do a web search for lists of shortcuts 

Don’t try to learn every shortcut in one go; instead, learn one or two and when they become second nature learn another couple.

Use text expansion

There must be some phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs that you use over and again. This could be contact info like your email address and phone number. It could be a standard reply to email requests. Whenever you notice you are writing something you have written before, or you find yourself looking for a previous document to copy the text for re-use, there is a candidate for text expansion.

Text expansion is a service where you link a short trigger phrase to a longer one so that when you type the trigger phrase it is replaced by the longer phrase. For example, when I type ‘socf’ it is replaced by statement of cash flows and ‘xbs’ is replaced by balance sheet. (I use x as the first letter for lots of my triggers because few real words begin with an x and it is on the main keyboard so takes fewer taps on a phone or tablet.)

I also use text expansion for auto-correction of words. For example, when I type ‘cipfa’ it will automatically be capitalised to CIPFA.

There are many text expansion apps available and which suits you depends in part on the device you have and how much you are willing to pay to save time. Textexpander is the one I have. It works across platforms and can be synced so that the same trigger shortcuts are available on all your devices. 

Bonus tip

If you use an Apple computer, an iPhone, or iPad then you can do you text expansion for free because Apple has built it into the operating systems. Go to the Keyboard section of settings to set it up. 

Use your voice

When I was a finance director in the early 2000s I had a voice recorder and a personal assistant, Lynn. I could, and did, talk into my voice recorder when walking to and from the office and give the tapes to Lynn to turn into letters, emails, reports, etc. Lynn would sometimes have time to type things for other members of staff but most of the staff, most of the time, had to write their own documents.

These days we can all dictate our writing using just a smartphone and I strongly recommend that you do. I am sure you can speak faster than you can type. Voice recognition software has improved over the years and it makes fewer mistakes out-of-the-box and the more you use it the better it gets as it learns the words you use.

I suggest next time you have a document to write that is more than 2 or 3 paragraphs long you try dictating the first draft on your phone. Email that document to your work account so that you can put the words into the official template and then finish the document. I think you could save a stack of time and effort.

Let me know your productivity tips and perhaps I will include them in a future post.