Looking for advice on how you can improve your inbox? Read on to discover our 4 tips for the best email management and reap the benefits.
At the very least you’re likely to have two email accounts to maintain, a personal and a professional one. Both of these can be crammed with clutter and promotional emails of little or no use. This can lead to you losing control of your inboxes very easily. Good email hygiene is as important as good general hygiene at work. It helps you keep a clear head so you can focus on your priorities, rather than being stuck trawling through endless spam and promotional messages.
If your inbox is reaching hundreds or even thousands of unread emails, then this article is certainly worth a read. This article will discuss four tips for email management you can use for an online spring clean. Read on to find out more.
Delete and Repeat
The first step towards cleaning up your inboxes is to go through it and delete everything you don’t need. This might seem like a daunting task, but you can make life easier for yourself by searching only for unread items and sieving through those.
Alternatively, if you’re happy enough to lose emails you can mark all as read or delete all. If there are emails you’re unsure whether to delete or not, archive them for your attention later and move on with the clean. Once you’ve finished this, you’ll be well on your way to an organised email account and ready for the next step.
Unsubscribe
The next step for email management is to get rid of any email subscriptions you no longer need. Otherwise you’ll have done the email equivalent of cutting weeds in your garden but leaving the roots in. Going through and identifying your subscriptions can be a grueling process but it is easier when using tools such as Unroll.me, a third-party website that will show you all the sites that you’re receiving emails from. If you’ve subscribed to something for a coupon or freebie, then claim and unsubscribe. There’s no need to keep subscriptions that you have no use for. They will just keep growing back. Once you’ve unsubscribed from everything you don’t need, you’ll be ready for stage three.
Folders
The third step is where the organisation begins. You’re going to want to categorise your emails as well as possible. If you get work emails from various teams you liaise with then having separate folders and assigning certain addresses to those folders will let you keep on top of things more easily. To do this on Gmail for example, look at the sidebar menu in full and click ‘categories’. Select the ‘manage labels’ command (labels being Gmail’s folders) and then ‘create new label’. Make as many folders as you need and then move on to the fourth and final step.
Filters
Finally, you’re going to want to set up filters so that emails are automatically distributed among your folders or trash. Again using Gmail as an example, open your inbox. Click the down arrow on the right hand side of the ‘search’ box. Enter your search criteria (email respondents, keywords, subject lines etc) and click ‘create filter within this search’. Assign the search to whichever folder it needs to go in and you’re away. If you do this perfectly, you’ll have successfully organised your email account.
Email Management Tips Summary
Don’t be deterred if you don’t use Gmail. Email accounts with other providers will have similar options and functionality. So remember:
- Delete unwanted emails.
- Unsubscribe from unwanted emails.
- Create folders to direct future mail to.
- Filter incoming emails into the folders.
Not so hard eh? It may sound like a dull task but it will save you a lot of time in the future and you’ll be very glad you did it!
Now you know the benefits of good email management, why not read about how good desk hygiene plays an important role in mental health and general well-being? Find out how on our top 5 desk cleaning tips blog.
