How to Manage Multiple Email Accounts

Ideas for dealing with work and personal emails

To manage multiple email accounts might sound like a complicated idea, but it can help you deal with your messages more effectively.

Whilst one account for everything allows for easy access, it has one big drawback. It blurs the line between work and life even more than it is already.

Separate email accounts help you to work at work and stop when you're away from it. They're easy to set up and freely available.

Don’t overdo it though. Managing several accounts is contrary to 80-20 thinking. Two or, at a push, three should suffice. One for work, the other for ‘life’; subdivide both into folders for your various roles, goals and projects.

More than one email account means you need to set clear boundaries in your life and work. This goes for your emails as much as your time.

Do you access your workplace email account when you’re not working? Why? To get ahead or to catch up? Do that and you’re playing with fire (well, time). When you check your work emails at home, who pays for it, and with what?

You know the answer.

The best way to separate life and work is to keep them both in their places as far as possible and within reason. Creating and managing separate email accounts allows you to do this.

Should you ever manage personal emails at work? Yes, if it’s time efficient. If you have easier email access at work than at home, it makes sense to deal with your personal emails in your working day. Just make sure you do it when you block off some 'downtime'.

To sum up…

• Keep a limit on work emails. Deal with them at work.

• Read and send personal emails whenever’s best, as long as they don’t encroach on your work time.

You can manage multiple email accounts –- you just need to keep them apart.

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