Adviser to Adviser advice: Managing those damn emails

Introducing Nicki Kane. Nicki is starting a new monthly practice management column we've called Adviser to Adviser Advice. In her first piece she provides practice ideas to manage emails and inboxes.

Thursday, October 9th 2025, 5:35PM

by Nicki Kane

Hi- I’m Nicki, and I’ll be popping up here regularly to offer quick snippets of ideas on how you can level up your systems and processes so that you get to spend more time doing the things you want to do and less time on the things you don’t!

I’m going to give a range of suggestions so that anyone from complete systems newbie to experienced business builder should hopefully find something in here to help.

We’re going to start with the thing I hear (and have!) complaints about the most- email!

Start by making sure of these basics:

- your emails sync with your CRM and automatically copy to the file of the person who sent it so that you’re not wasting time manually copying, or worse, risk losing a key email.
- use folders and rules to automatically move non-essential emails out of your inbox. Make sure you can see the folders and preferably have a visible count of how many are unread, because ‘out of sight is out of mind’ and you’ll very likely forget to check them if you can’t see them!

Tip #1: clear the backlog
If you’ve got hundreds (or even thousands!) of emails staring back at you every day, I can guarantee a few things: you’re missing opportunities, there’s probably trouble lurking in there, and you definitely don’t need to read them all!
Yes, you are going to need to put aside some time to clear them, but the best way to start is to use the filter ‘sort by: from’ (the default is usually ‘sort by: date’)- that way all the emails from a specific address will be together, and I guarantee you’ll be able to either delete or archive about 75% of them straight away. What’s left will be MUCH easier to go through and before you know it you might even be looking at inbox zero!

Tip #2: if you see anything that you don’t ever read (newsletters etc)- then just unsubscribe.
You can always sign up again later if you really want / have to!

Tip #3: set up ‘quick actions’
These are pre-written chunks of text that you can insert fast into places like emails or word docs so that you don’t have to write them out every time- or better still just skip to #5 and sign up for a text expander app that’s even easier to use!

Tip #4: Use your out of office for more than just holiday announcements
You can put all sorts of information in here: a link to your booking system, a list of FAQ’s, links to forms for address / phone number / etc changes, expected response times etc- just make sure to test that you’re not using too many links or it might get flagged as spam.

Tip #5: check out a text expander program like… well… TextExpander!
There’s lots like this out there, but this is the one we’ve used for years so I can personally vouch for how awesome it is! You write out whatever text you want to be able to access fast (can be anything: from a couple of words to an entire Scope of Service email and beyond), create a short code, then whenever you type that code the body of text you wrote out will automatically get copied into wherever you are- and it even works on mobile!

This has the added bonus of being individually customisable and able to be shared among your team. That way you know whatever you’ve written out is what will be sent- meaning it’s compliant and in the brand voice you want, as well as saving heaps of time- we regularly save 2-3 hours a week per person just by using this one app!

Ok- onto some more advanced suggestions:

Tip #6: Consider using multiple email addresses for different functions in your business instead of just names of people:

That way when roles or people change, you don’t have to re-educate your clients to email somewhere different. For example, in Planning Pros we have support@, admin@ and claims@- different people have access to different ones, and when we have changes it’s really easy to grant or revoke access to the specific email accounts!

Tip #7: consider levelling up your email system with a collaboration tool.

Microsoft Teams does have something like this but we use Missive. The main thing we love about it is that we can have chats about emails next to the emails but not in the thread itself- completely removing the ‘oh ****’ moment when you realise you just hit reply all with something that was supposed to be a private comment! You can also have all emails that come in to the business go into a team inbox, where you can then go in and assign an email to the team member that’s best to handle it instead of simply whoever it was sent to- and it’s totally customisable as well, so you can override or exclude certain email addresses or people etc.

So that’s it for now: I’d love to hear any thoughts or questions so please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickikane/

Find out more about Nicki here

Tags: A newsletter Nicki Kane