Easy tips to clean up your professional inbox

Do you feel overwhelmed and frustrated when you open your email inbox and see a bunch of unread emails or messages, that you haven’t take care of yet? Do you receive a lot of unwanted emails? Are you familiar with the struggle on how to organize them in folders? Does all this effort demotivate you?
A lot of people report to feel emotionally drained and exhausted when facing such email experience, and their job satisfaction is challenged.

So let us grab some sponges and dusters (read: some methods other than delete button) and let us help you declutter your digital space.

Let us help you optimize your digital working space.

Picture your ideal inbox

Keeping your inbox organized isn’t difficult, but it does take some effort. Taking into account how busy everyone has become, you really do not need another bottleneck in your workflow.
Your focus should be defining what you want to get rid of as much as deciding on what you wish to keep. So, imagine your ideal inbox. What types of email do you keep? Which are important enough to keep?

1. Delete and archive

No explanation needed.
We can never know when a specific work email can be useful again. Perhaps a claim will arrive after three years, or a proof of delivery will be required … If you wish to remain on the safe side, use archive function instead of deleting. You can create an Archive folder or designate an existing folder to use as the Archive folder and establish a rule to automate moving emails from your main inbox.

Archiving emails means, they no longer appear in your inbox. My practice is to archive anything older than three months. These mails remain available, but they no longer clutter your inbox.
You should define the time range of emails that are worth storing. Ask yourself »When was the time I needed an email that is 10 years old? « Can’t remember? Repeat the question, narrowing the time range to 5, 3, … one year.. This will help you provide the guideline for further actions.

2. The two-minute rule

Here’s a general rule of thumb that you can apply to improve the way your emails are handled: for every incoming email, ask yourself if you can deal with it in under two minutes. If the answer is yes, deal with it immediately. If no, ad it is not of high importance, mark it unread and deal with it later.
This will help you solve many small tasks within a short response time and will help you organize your workflow in a manner, that will provide you more time for these ‘over-two-minutes’ emails. Just do not keep them lingering Unread for too long. They must be dealt with eventually.

3. Create several email addresses

We got your attention here, didn’t we? This might not work for everyone, and it seems counterproductive at a first glance, but let us explain.

Gmail has a fantastic feature that will help you expand the number of your email adresses.

Main email address: You should of course have the email address that represents you and your role in the company, is widely recognized and written on your business card.
How about a second mail for e-newsletter signups? Even though you might not want to sign up for too many emails, you can ignore this inbox pretty much all the time. And it might quickly help you to delete all content connected to this email address when is no longer needed.
A third email for login to specific websites like educational, shopping, B2B sites etc.? It could help you organize the content and remove signup, login, forgotten password … emails from you main Inbox.

Bonus advice: Use Gmail for multiple accounts. Although Gmail is not advised to be used as a business address, you might create an email account for less important uses (like signing to a newsletter) Perhaps you did not know this, but Gmail has a fantastic feature that will help you expand the number of actual Gmail addresses you have. The important thing is the + character. Let us say your email address is your.name@gmail.com. If you want to sign up to our newsletter, you can simply use your.name+angelis@gmail.com Just make sure your.name comes first and then add whatever you desire after +. Any email sent to the above address will still go to your.name@gmail.com

The beauty of this is, that you can organize or delete all emails sent to specific email, and there is also a great security feature: you can spot phishing attacks more effectively, if you notice, that an email was sent to your main email address instead to your newsletter address.

4. Simplify your email folder system

Too many folders can clutter your Inbox even worse than a large number of emails. A very good practice is to use mailbox rules to send incoming messages to specific folders automatically. Automated mail, daily reports, and programmed notifications can be neatly moved to a particular folder, where they wait for your further actions.
Keep in mind that most email clients provide very good search and filter options. Creating folders and moving each mail manually to ‘organize’ your communication will take too much of your precious time, and your effectiveness will in fact decline when you will open and search each and every available folder.
Do not be afraid to change your folder structure in case you note the current one is not working for you. Half an hour spent on organizing and deleting, might save you many hours of looking for information in the future.

5. Use junk or spam filters and tags

Not every email client provides junk filtering, but if your does, use it. Mostly these features work very well, some need additional help. So, when a spam email arrives in your inbox, do tag it as a spam (right click and select Spam or Move to Spam etc) This will help automatically clean the email you never requested.

6. Unsubsrcribe

At some point, you will not need the newsletter anymore or you will receive too many emails, or you will not even remember why you subscribed in the first place. Instead of deleting every single message, or even worse – letting all the messages clutter your inbox, exert your right to opt out of an email list. You can always subscribe again later if you decide to.

Hopefully these tips will help you become less prone to headaches and improve your efficiency. In case you require additional assistance on improving your digital business workflows, we would gladly respond. Send us an email – our inbox is all clean and tidy and we will respond promptly. 😉