How to Manage Your Email Inbox

Well hey there!

Email is something we just can’t avoid these days. We use email for everything in our lives from work to personal. With more and more people working remotely, you may find that your work email fills up with things that aren’t even really that important.

I used to work in a call center like environment. Everyone would be making calls to probably the same people a lot of the times. When that person would call back in and they didn’t know who called, we would just send an email to everyone saying so and so is on the line, who called? Or, when everyone was in the office, did you used to get the very generous email subject line: “Coffee and doughnuts are in the break room!” I loved those emails! But, you could just imagine the amount of emails that were piling up in my inbox.

If your inbox is inundated with emails and you find yourself overwhelmed with trying to dig through the garbage to get to the essential things, you may need to do some spring cleaning with your email inbox.

Here are three ways to help CLEAN UP and KEEP UP with your email inbox.

1. Use A Third Party

If your inbox is flooded, using a third party company to help go through your inbox is a great place to start. Unroll.me is a free email management system that will allow you to easily subscribe from unwanted emails with just one click instead of searching for each email and subscribing from each one individually. 

Mailstrom.com is another company you could try. There is a free trial to start but they have plans starting as low as $10 a month. I used the free trial on this and I preferred this over unroll.me. There were many more features and less issues I found. You can unsubscribe, delete, move emails to certain folders, and much more with this program.

2. Create Folders

Once you get a good grasp and have caught up on dwindling down your inbox, one way that you can stop things from going to your inbox is to create “filters” or “smart folders”. If you still like getting emails from retailers with deals, but don’t want them flooding your inbox, you can create a filter that will automatically place all of these types of emails into a certain folder. That way you can just reference them when you want to.

3. Set Aside Blocks Of Time For Email Management

I have fallen into the trap of looking at my email every time that notification would go off. Even when I’m out with friends or family. I would look at it, then say, oh, I need to do something with this so I’ll just leave it as an unread message to refer back to. I was not accomplishing anything by doing this and it even caused me stress and decision fatigue from looking at the email multiple times when I didn’t have time to take care of it right away. I have switched to setting aside 15 minutes three times a day to just go through my inbox AND have turned off notifications for my email just so I won’t be tempted to look at them throughout the day.

As an EXTRA bonus this week, I have put together an email workflow chart to use as a guide when opening up an email. Not sure whether you should keep the email or delete it? This will help!