Email is such a wonderful thing, because it lets you get in touch with multiple people rapidly. But email can also be a very cumbersome thing, particularly for the virtual assistant who spends her day juggling various clients along with potential clients and personal matters. But email doesn’t have to consume your entire day, and it doesn’t have to make you miserable. Here are some tips to help you survive the virtual assistant email bombarding.

1. Make sure you have separate email addresses for business and personal matters. This is the most important thing you can do. Your business email address should be one that matches your domain name for your virtual assistant website so you can be taken seriously as a business.

2. If your client(s) has a domain, suggest to them they give you an email address with their domain name. Unbelievably, this will help you keep your clients and their tasks and information straight.

3. Set up email software like Outlook with rules to put email from certain people, domains, etc. automatically into certain folders. I have each of my clients’ mail going into a folder specifically for them. You would not believe how this will help you manage what you have to do for whom.

4. If clients send you email with a task that is to be done on a future date, always “task” it in Outlook. You can even use the color coding system built in Outlook to help you differentiate between clients or projects.

5. When you receive junk email in your inbox, mark it as junk or blacklist it, so you do not continue to receive it in your inbox. I know it’s tempting to keep deleting it from your inbox, but in the end, it will be less time consuming if it automatically disposes of these unwanted emails in your inbox.

6. Use a “throw away” email address from yahoo, Gmail, or some other free email provider to subscribe to any newsletters, to purchase products online, or to give out for surveys, etc. Having a separate account just for this will help you, because you can only log into this account when (and if) you have time for such novelties. [Yes, even my newsletter. But still do read it! ]

Also, one final word about being a virtual assistant working with email: If you email someone and do not hear back, always follow up with a telephone call. Sometimes spam filters or settings will grab even legitimate emails, so don’t assume someone’s ignoring your email. Assume it didn’t go through first.

Happy email organizing!

Keep moving toward success.