
But trusting someone with your outbox is only advisable if you trust that person’s judgment about your work and priorities, and know that their grammar and spelling is at least as good as your own. How much skill and discretion can you expect? In the most ideal situation, you’d get daily support from a highly trusted assistant who has direct access to your inbox and outbox, so they could work through calendar invitations, billing or financial admin, or other routine requests. Here are few questions to ask yourself before deciding how much email management you can delegate, and whom you want to hire for that support: How much of your email you delegate depends not only on how much support you have available, but also on your working style, your relationship with your assistant, and your office culture.
#Best way to manage email inbox assistant full#
If the idea of delegating email management fills you with alarm, know that you don’t need to give someone full access to your email in order to get meaningful help managing your inbox (more on this in the setup section below). Considering how much of your workload likely involves reviewing incoming messages, replying to calendar requests and ensuring your top-priority emails get answered promptly, asking for assistance with email triage is in fact one of the best uses of administrative support. The most effective setup combines human support a smart set of email rules and filters-so that you’re not wasting your assistant’s time on the routine job of deleting junk mail or filing missives that you don’t need.

They can function as your email triage system, conduct your daily inbox reviews, or even reply to individual messages. Thanks to the emergence of the collaborative economy, in which people can access services on a pay-for-use model, there are more and more options for getting administrative support, whether it be using a virtual personal assistant service like Zirtual, hiring a part-time assistant through Craigslist, or having more traditional access to administrative support through your company.Īn assistant can reduce the burden of email management in ways automated systems can’t, be they third-party plugins or rules and filters that you set up within your inbox. That kind of support is no longer limited to the lucky few who have administrative help on staff, either. But they can still play a useful role in managing your messages.

Now we all use email, and assistants are a seemingly rare commodity.

In the early days of the internet, email natives loved to trade tales of executives who asked their assistants to print out emails so they could read and respond to them on paper.
