Your Inbox can feel overwhelming. Don't let it.
Is your email Inbox serving you? Or is it the other way around?
Unless you purposely avoid it, you communicate digitally with other people daily in 2023.
Email is one digital medium. There are also text messages, social media platforms, passwords, electronic documents, cloud servers, contact numbers, mailing addresses, and data security in our digital world.
It is enough to frustrate the most tech savvy person.
Today, let's tackle email.
5 ways to make your email Inbox work
1. Do not check email continuously and turn off notifications.
I know. We are addicted. But checking your email interrupts your workflow and thus your productivity.
Turn off all notifications.
Email software clients have too many ways to interrupt you. Microsoft Outlook can, for example, audibly ping, change the cursor, place an envelope on the Task Bar, and jiggle a moving alert on the bottom right. All those together will interrupt your train of thought. Turn them off.
Instead, check email at defined times and process them then. By process I mean respond, file, or calendarize.
For example, in the morning, at lunch, and 30 minutes before closing, check email, sort and file them, and block time on your calendar to complete needed Tasks.
This is a huge adjustment for corporate culture. I understand. But what you lose in immediacy you gain in productivity.
You decide when to check your email. Do not let it decide for you.
2. Build folders and Archive regularly.
When you check your email, deal with the content you can right away, add required activities to your To Do/Action list or calendar, and then file those emails out of your Inbox or delete them.
Build folders and nest subfolders. Keep the structure simple.
File emails (consider using rules or filters) into relevant folders to keep emails of a specific topic or subject together.
For example, my work email account has 5 folders: 01 Clients, 02 Business, 03 Marketing, 04 Learning, and 05 Personal. The numbers sort the folders in priority order. Then, there are subfolders under each. 02 Business contains Accounting, Insurance, IT, and Legal.
Further, at the end of each day or week, empty your Sent folder emails into those same folders. In this way, conversations are preserved in their entirety.
Finally, utilize the Archive function to control the size of your mailbox. Consider Archiving annually and start the year with a clean, rebuilt file structure. That way it continues to be relevant for you.
I spent a lifetime in corporate and so am accustomed to keeping all emails to, frankly, CYA. However, that makes for enormous Archive folders that rarely if ever get referenced.
You know your business. Only keep the emails you need and let the rest go.
3. Don’t use your Inbox as your To Do list.
Do not keep emails in your Inbox to remind you what to do.
Emails multiply and it is hard to manage priority. There are colored flags and such, but that is a layer of complexity you don’t need.
Keep your To Do/Action list elsewhere. There are myriad ways to record this: My Tasks in Outlook, Reminders in Apple, Tasks in Google. I personally use Microsoft To Do. Analysis of these is outside the scope of this article, but your Inbox is not the place to do it.
4. Keep your Work account separate from your Personal account.
Whether you work in a large corporate firm or run your own business, keep your personal and business correspondence separate.
There are many paperless billing options for utilities and banking and online shopping is ubiquitous. It may be tempting to register with your business account to keep things “simple”.
On the contrary, it just blurs the lines between business and home.
For one thing, you should never assume that your work emails are private if you work for anyone else. Should your employment situation change, this is something else to unravel.
You may consider maintaining 2 accounts at home: 1 for finances, and 1 for online shopping. In this way you can track coupons and bargain codes without getting in the way of your mortgage payment.
This last suggestion may be a step toward complexity, though, so proceed with caution.
5. Unsubscribe from mailing lists you do not need.
At the bottom of every marketing email there is a link where you can Unsubscribe.
Take the time to unsubscribe from emails you no longer need, read, or want.
Some of them are easier to do than others. Oftentimes they want more information about why, or they want you to change frequency rather than cancel.
Be ruthless.
If you’re overwhelmed at the sheer number of marketing emails, set a goal. Unsubscribe from 3 a day. After a week you will have done 21, and that will make a difference in your Inbox.
Bonus: Aim for progress, not perfection.
An important thing to remember when changing how you manage email is that it does not have to change immediately.
You also can’t really mess it up. Try things and see how it works.
Rethink how you handle your email and stop doing what isn’t working.
When you're ready to tackle your tough organization project, I am here to help you learn how.
Let's RETHINK organization together.
For more information, visit the RETHINK website today.
Mandy Thomas is a professional organizer fulfilling her lifelong passion for creating order out of chaos. She finds joy in helping people tackle their most overwhelming spaces and collections to create the optimal living space and enjoy their homes.
RETHINK organization is on a mission to help you develop long-term patterns of organization that you can maintain and feel good about long after our work together is done.
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