Email Tasks Management in Educational Institutions

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Jira, as the tracker for teams planning and building great products, has a significant market share in the world. The types of companies that use Jira are diverse. From software development teams to supermarket chains. From small startups to enterprise companies. Users from the educational sector occupy a special place. Incorporating solutions like Jira and Confluence, prestigious institutions like Stanford, Cambridge, and MIT have seamlessly integrated tools for effective project management, customer service, and collaborative documentation. These platforms serve not only to facilitate research and student group interactions but also to enhance overall operational efficiency.

Of course, Jira is not the only one. Email is an essential and integral tool.

There are many emails, and good email management is a necessary skill. So, let's see how it works.

Typical Challenges in Handling Email Communication within Educational Environments

Gaining mastery over your inbox presents a formidable task for individuals across all fields, yet those in the education sector encounter distinct difficulties. While an all-encompassing enumeration is unfeasible, let's delve into a couple of recurring hurdles that educators and staff frequently confront.

Urgency

Although some of the urgency linked with emails might come from our constant connectivity nowadays, online and hybrid learning has made specific messages genuinely time-sensitive: 

• As learning takes place more remotely and at different times, teachers get messages from parents and students who require assistance beyond regular school hours.
• Since a student's progress with assignments might rely on getting quick responses from their teacher, educators often deal with many tasks at once and feel like they need to be online all the time. 

These situations and more can complicate how teachers manage emails.

Collaboration

Answering emails that come in often needs input from other people, and this is mainly the case for those in education.

For instance, school counselors might need to ask a few teachers for details while creating a plan for their students. Support staff at a university might get questions from students that involve different departments like admissions, financial aid, housing, and IT.

When you try to get answers from your colleagues or departments through email, it usually leads to forwarding messages, emails getting mixed up, and the chance of mistakenly sharing internal information with the original sender.

Seasonality

Even though dealing with emails is tricky all year round, communication in educational settings can get highly chaotic during certain times.

Apart from the pressure teachers and school staff face to get everything ready for a new school year – like the campus, programs, and lessons – they also have to handle a flood of digital messages from parents, students, and each other.

Furthermore, colleges and universities sometimes have students working in part-time positions through work-study programs. These students are often in charge of handling incoming email requests.

Even though assigning tasks to these students helps, teaching them while managing many conversations can be stressful for everyone involved.

In any case, if you work with both Jira and an email account and some of your email is bound to be transformed into Jira tasks, you need an assistant to help you manage your email.

How to Forward Emails to Jira Issues

Converting emails to Jira issues is one of the most common tasks. For such needs, it's better to have a reliable tool that will protect you, not only in such cases.

Many academic and educational institutions are already using the Email&Tasks: Jira Cloud for Gmail app. Here's a brief overview of how it can help you and its key features:

Quickly transform your emails into Jira tasks:

1) Automatically, with the help of AI

2) In manual mode.

With the "Include email content to Description if any" feature, you can transfer the entire content of the email to the issue description, and the "Include email Attachments if any" feature will attach all the attachments that are present in the email to the issue.

3) Schedule a meeting in Google Calendar and immediately set a task in Jira that relates to it simultaneously.

4-7) Edit and comment on tasks. Log time in a Jira issue. In short, stay connected to Jira even when you're in your email inbox.

What about a cell phone? Being constantly on the move, sometimes we don't have access to a laptop. Or you need to set a task in Jira based on an email urgently. So, Email&Tasks will cope with such a task - the addon is available for use in the mobile version of Gmail.

Email&Tasks also includes a Chrome browser extension.

In addition to being like your own little Jira, available in any browser, the extension has the ability to detect the presence of tasks in emails and display their name, type, and status. You don't need to open the email; you can see it on the Gmail start screen and immediately focus on what you need to do. Also, in the settings, you can set the type of Jira task display that will be most convenient for you. Install the Chrome web store extension, sign in with your Jira account, and enjoy!

Instead of Conclusion

Autumn... It is time for new knowledge and new achievements. For educational institutions, it is always a "hot time." So, what better time to optimize your work than now? And why not tackle emails first, which are always an avalanche in which it's easy to get lost?

We're waiting for you in the Email&Tasks: Jira Cloud for Gmail team. Here's a 30-day free trial to get to know the app better. The app is free for teams of up to 10 users.

Happy fall and great task management optimization!🍁