As someone who likes to be organised, the beginning of the year is a great time to clear out your Inbox.
Especially if there are emails lurking in there or you use it as a filing system.
My personal Inbox is a favourite for that. Newsletters and offers which then result in more emails coming in my Inbox. You can ignore or unsubscribe pretty regularly but this doesn’t mean the occasional important email gets missed in amongst all the clutter.
These days you can’t move without having to give out your email for access to one thing or another.
It’s useful to have a ‘junk’ email address just for this purpose.
- Junk email you’ll never check - I use two.
- Partial junk email - you only need to check periodically.
Email is one of the most frequent challenges that comes up in conversations with clients, in seminars and workshops and a frequent topic for
articles and blog posts.
It is one of the first things I worked on with a client years ago.
They had thousands of emails
in their Inbox. Most just needed to be filed away but with everything else going on, they were just too busy.
Their inbox was just filling up and it was difficult to keep track and find things.
Emails were getting missed, awaiting action and needing a response but had dropped out of sight.
So this is what we did:
- Identified the scale of the
problem
- Sorted through the existing emails to find any ‘lurking’
- Tackled it a few at a time - a few minutes every day
- Quickly got the thousands down to a few hundred over the course of the following month.
And if you find email a challenge, you’re not alone.
It continues to be one of the things I work with clients on. Either helping to clear out your Inbox or just learning how to organise and manage email, and create better email
habits.
Since the start of the year, I’ve been clearing out my own Inbox(es). I’ve just had another big purge so I thought I’d share a few of my processes to help you keep on top of yours.
Clear out your Inbox
These apply to both the Business and Personal Inbox.
Each time I check my email, when I come across one I no longer need or want, I take a few seconds to click Unsubscribe.
If you mostly ignore, rarely or ever read it … unsubscribe?
[Be wary of unsubscribing from unsolicited, spam email, this can be a way of just confirming your email is valid and results in more spam. Just mark as junk/spam and delete.]
Next, delete all the previous emails from the list you’ve just unsubscribed from.
If you don’t want to get distracted or don’t have time to do this right away, create an ‘Unsubscribe’ folder and move it there or Flag it for later.
Then, or later, put on your favourite podcast and have a ‘clear out your Inbox’ session.
Once a day for a few minutes at a time, once a week … or once a month. I’ve
just listened to a whole podcast series by doing this over the last few days.
Delete anything older than a few months.
If you
haven’t read it by now, you probably don’t need the information or it’s going to be out of date.
You can always find it when you need it, by searching the relevant website or blog.
Sort through existing emails …
- Use the email address or Subject to filter and delete all older emails from the same source. There were some lurking I’ve previously unsubscribed from but haven’t deleted all the existing ones.
- Search based on date. Anything older than six or twelve
months, gets deleted. You can be brave and just bulk delete or filter by sender or subject matter first.
Do this every so often and you’ll gradually clear out your Inbox.
If an email is important
or needed for reference, file it.
Use Inbox features
There are more and more inbuilt features to help you
manage your Inbox.
In Outlook:
- Focused and Other. Put your most important emails in Focused. Everything else ends up in Other.
- Use the ‘Sweep’ feature to only keep the latest, last 10 or move and delete completely, as they enter your Inbox.
In Gmail:
- Categories - Social, Updates, Promotions and Forum.
- Starred - mark emails for action, read later, for sorting
- Important - emails you read regularly
They ‘learn’ what’s important as you move emails into the correct category, so future emails are treated the
same.
While Email providers can be pretty good at categorising emails, they can end up marking them as spam when they’re not.
Check the Junk/Spam email. I’ve found a few lurking in their that shouldn’t be.
Organise your email with Filters, Rules and Folders. Use these to move emails on particular topics or from specified senders into a relevant Folder and out of your Inbox.
How many newsletters are you signed up for?
I love learning new things and following
the experts but there’s only so many you can really follow or handle at one time.
Pick a few favourites or the most relevant to you at the time and stick with them.
I’ve also noticed many of the experts I follow are also connected or collaborate with other experts, so if there’s something they’re sharing, I’ll probably find out through a collaborative email.
Are you guilty of hanging on to things ‘just in case’?
Yes, I can be guilty of doing that too, but the freedom I feel when I do a bulk sort and delete or have a clear out is amazing.
