It happens to the best of us. You let your inbox slide for a few days, weeks, or months, and bam! Suddenly you have pages of emails to sort through.
Cleaning out and managing your inbox is good practice for organizational purposes, but I also believe that it vastly reduces stress. Isn’t it nicer to see just five or 10 emails in your inbox rather than 50 or 300? It’s certainly significantly less overwhelming!
Here are five steps to cleaning (and then managing) your inbox:
- Set aside the time to do it. The amount of time you’ll need depends on how many emails you have to deal with, but I recommend setting aside twice as much time as you THINK you’ll need. You don’t want to get interrupted or have to rush the job. This is important, and it needs to be prioritized.
- Make a plan. What kinds of emails do you normally get? Can you cancel subscriptions to newsletters you never read? Do you have an issue with deleting emails (“just in case” you’ll need it in the future)? Can you streamline your system better (for example, requesting in-person meetings, getting a better spam filter, etc.)?
- Set up folders. Now that you know which emails you want to save, and the variety of emails you generally receive, you can set up folders. They might be as simple as “bills,” “family,” “newsletters,” and “work.” Or you might have folders that go into greater detail, outlining the type of work (“presentations,” “meetings,” etc.).
- Start at the beginning: your oldest email in the inbox. Respond to it or deal with it (by doing the task needed in the email), delete it, or move it to the correct folder. You’ll be able to delete some emails or move them into folders without opening them, but others will require a little extra work.
- Maintain! Now you should only have five or 10 emails in your inbox, maximum (these might be emails that you are waiting on something else before you can respond, or require a little more thought before you can immediately respond). Your inbox should stay this way – but that’s not always realistic. I aim to have no more than five or 10 emails in my inbox, but often it’s closer to 15 or 20. If I go over 20, I know that things are getting cluttered and that I’m probably getting behind on answering people. Setting up a certain number (for me it’s 20; for you it might be 10 or 30) as your “red light” for getting back into gear to tidy your inbox is the best way to maintain tidiness of your emails. It will be much quicker to deal with your emails if you do it when you hit your “red light” limit than if you slide back and find yourself with four pages of emails to manage!
How do you keep your emails in order? Is your inbox sparse or crammed full of emails? How does the state of your inbox have an impact on how you feel? Share in the comments below!