Change something in your life and clear out your inbox. This post is for those of you who receive too many emails and struggle with managing your email accounts. Have clean inbox! Be more productive.
If you have an inbox that is massively overloaded with messages, you need to give yourself some breathing room. A flooded inbox is overwhelming, and you do not know where to start. Let’s find a way to get started cleaning your inbox.
1. Organize by folders various types of emails. You can create an ‘actions’ folder or label in your email. This is where you are going to store any emails that you need to take action on. Go through your inbox and check off 10–15 that are the most urgent action emails, and file them in this new folder.
2. Set up filtering rules to automatically have certain emails delivered into respective folders, e.g. school, work, finance, family, subscriptions, etc.
3. Unsubscribe to get rid of unnecessary and unwanted newsletters. Unsubscribe from newsletters, catalogs, notices from services, social media updates, etc. Delete them all from your temporary folder. Filter out notifications and other things you do not really need or want to read.
4. Delete old and unimportant messages on a weekly or monthly basis. Pick only the most important emails. You can temporarily archive all the rest in a new ‘temporary’ folder. File everything unimportant that is still in your inbox into this ‘temporary’ folder. Everything. You are going to get these out of the way and not worry about them at the moment.
5. Trash spam emails immediately. When you have time, chunk through the temporary folder, 5–10 minutes at a time. Feel very free to mass delete a bunch of spam emails you know you will never need to read.
6. If you can respond to an email right away, do it. No more allowing your inbox to pile up. You can set a new policy. Every new email that comes in will follow these rules: process from the top down, or, make quick decisions and act. You must take one of the following actions: reply quickly (in five sentences or less), put it in your action folder and to-do list, forward, archive, delete, etc. The one thing you must do in any case is get all the emails out of the inbox.
7. Turn off email notifications, so you will not need to check email inbox every time you see an incoming message.
The beauty of an empty inbox is a thing to behold. It is calming and peaceful. An inbox that is overflowing with actions, urgent calls for responses, stuff to read is chaotic, stressful and overwhelming.
