Between my personal, blog, and work inboxes the notifications don’t stop rolling in. It can be overwhelming at times, and even though I typically don’t let me unread messages get above a couple of hundred across all of the accounts it can be really overwhelming! I’ve seen pictures on Twitter of people sharing their unread message notifications and they would be bragging about having tens of thousands of unread emails. That just gives me anxiety and I hope the following email organization tips help them and y’all organize your inboxes.
Unsubscribe from junk emails – There’s a good chance at least 50% of the emails in your inbox are from retailers, restaurants, old newsletters, or other things you don’t remember signing up for or just don’t need. Go ahead and unsubscribe from them, either manually or using a tool like Unroll.me.
Create folders – I’m always shocked when I see people who keep all of their emails in their inbox. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Gmail, Outlook, or any email service you have the option to create additional folders. You can get as specific as you want, but I recommend at least starting with creating “to read”, “to respond”, “waiting for response” folders and any additional ones you might need because they’ll help with the next tip.
Create rules – Work smarter not harder! Let your inbox do the sorting for you. Do you receive a lot of emails from one specific person? Or about a specific thing? Create a folder and then a rule to send all of the emails about that to the specific folder.
Archive instead of deleting – I don’t like to delete emails. Let me rephrase. I don’t like to delete emails that have information that I might need. All of those junk emails from stores get deleted, but I still have work and school email exchanges from 2012 in one of my inboxes! You never know when you need to reference them. Save storage space by archiving instead of deleting, or take it a step further and export them as PST files!