Is your email inbox cluttered with messages that you haven’t had the time to read? Do you find it hard to open your email inbox that is overwhelming?
Getting your inbox clean and organized is very quick and easy. You have to learn how to organize your inbox well. When your email inbox is clean and organized, it’s easy to find the messages you need and even get rid of the ones that you don’t need.
The goal of organizing your email inbox is to achieve Inbox Zero. It is when your inbox is completely empty, and your mail is dealt with as soon as it comes in. But how do you achieve this? I gathered some useful tips from different sites and here are some:
Organize Your Inbox Regularly and Often
Nobody enjoys being disturbed when working on a serious task. The alerts and notifications from incoming emails may become annoying, which is why many people turn them off and ignore them. But this could result to an unmanageable inbox when those unread emails accumulate for too long.
The best approach is to schedule blocks of time during the day for reading and responding to emails. Ten or fifteen minutes is usually enough. What matters most is that you don’t skip them. Also, avoid spending too much time on individual emails. Archive emails that don’t require a response, respond to emails that need it, and snooze emails that you don’t know how to respond to at the moment.
Use Labels and Folders
You should delete as many inbox email messages as possible. The fewer emails there are in your inbox, the easier it is to find a specific message when you need it. Mail clients use folders where you store emails so that they don’t clutter your inbox. Several folders can be created and dedicated each to specific emails, such as work-related emails, social media notifications, or emails from friends and family. Your inbox is your main folder with all your inbox emails.
On the other hand, labels are similar to folders in that you’ll find each label name in example in Gmail’s folder navigation panel. When you select a label, you’ll see all the emails with that label. These are different from folders in and it work like post-it notes. When you assign labels to inbox emails, the emails don’t actually move that’s why a single message can have many labels but be present only in one folder.
Create Multiple Email Accounts
Having multiple accounts (for example, one account for personal emails, another account for work emails, and a third account for online services) makes it easier to organize email messages. You might also consider using disposable email accounts. A disposable email is an extra measure of security when signing up for services you may not use in the future or when filling out online subscription forms to access additional content. Make sure you don’t use a disposable email account for anything important.
Rule Them All
Rules help you identify emails by sender, subject line, or recipient to automatically place them in the correct folder, assign them the proper labels, or delete them. Email rules are also called filters, and many popular email services support them out of the box. While each service handles this task differently, learning how to filter emails in your Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo account can reduce the amount of time you spend managing your inbox.
Archive Emails to Keep Your Inbox Clean
Archiving helps keep your inbox clean by hiding unimportant emails that you’re not ready to delete. For example, imagine you receive an assignment from your boss. After you complete the task, you could delete the original message. However, you wouldn’t be able to read the message in the future. By archiving the message, you make it disappear from your inbox to reduce the clutter, and you can come back to the message later if you need to.
From time to time, clean up your archived messages to free up storage space. You can either archive messages manually or configure an automatic inbox cleaner to delete messages older than 30 days.
Organize Emails Using Stars and Flags
Some mail clients let you star and flag emails. Consider taking advantage of this feature as much as possible because it allows you to visually distinguish emails you want to look at later.
Here’s how to star a message for example in Gmail:
- Open your Gmail inbox.
- Go to the left of the message, then click the star icon.
Some mail clients let users set up multiple stars and flags, allowing them to differentiate emails based on specified criteria, for example, low, medium, or high urgency.
Unsubscribe from Unwanted Emails
Unwanted subscriptions are the main enemy of anyone who strives to achieve and maintain Inbox Zero. From newsletters to advertisements, they can quickly overwhelm your inbox and make it difficult to spot important messages. Marketers have learned to write newsletters and advertisements as if they were coming from a friend or acquaintance, making it more difficult to spot them and get rid of them.
When you want to bypass those situations, email management tools can help you automatically unsubscribe from emails, unwanted newsletters, advertisements, and other unwanted mailings.
These are some of the tips to keep your Email inbox clean and organized. Do you know some? Feel free to comment!
Sources:
https://clean.email/organize-inbox-email-messages
https://toggl.com/blog/email-management-tips