It’s no surprise that email has become one of the main ways for people to communicate with each other. It’s easy to use and allows for attachments of photos and documents, and it’s sent and received instantly without having to wait for the postal service to send it. It also doesn’t require postage. The ease of email is also one reason that businesses use it to not only communicate with employees and business partners but to also keep in touch with customers through email marketing and newsletters. As great as email is, the onslaught of incoming mail can quickly fill up your inbox and make it hard to sort through it to find the important emails from the ones that aren’t so important or are spam. So how does a person, especially a business person, organize their inbox to better find the important messages from the rest?
One thing is to make folders to send your emails into. It might be tempting to make a variety of different folders, but for business people, there’s really only 5 folders you really need to keep your inbox organized: “Inbox” for all your incoming email, “Today” where you will put all incoming email that needs to be done or responded to “today”, “This Week” for emails requiring your attention this week, “This Month/Quarter” for emails that need to be dealt with during the month/quarter, and “FYI” for important information that you may need to reference again at a later date. If you have other types of email you can make a separate folder for the overflow.
In general, to organize your inbox you will want to:
1. Clean it up. Keep your inbox only for what it was intended to be used for incoming email. Delete any messages you don’t need access to anymore. Don’t delete anything you may need at a later date, like receipts. File the ones you want to keep into relevant folders (make folders if you need to). Junk emails should be marked as spam or sent to the spam folder if they didn’t get sent there already.
2. Unsubscribe. If you signed up for email newsletters but don’t really need them or read them, unsubscribe from them. Also, unsubscribe from notifications from social media like or (unless you really need them). Try out unroll.me, it’s a personal favorite of mine.
3. Consolidate. If you have multiple email addresses, try to consolidate them. You might want to keep personal and business emails separate, but if you can, consolidate your various emails. Get rid of old email addresses you don’t use, or if possible, forward addresses to another. Another option would be to use one email program to check multiple addresses like Outlook or Apple Mail.
4. Auto-filter. Some email services, like Gmail, have an auto-filter option, where you can train it where to send an email and how to label it.
5. Boomerang. This is a plugin for Google and Outlook that will allow you to make an email disappear and reappear at a later date when you’re ready to deal with it. You can also schedule emails to be sent at a later time and also to set up recurring emails.
There are also some handy management tools that can help you organize your email inbox. You can find a list of some of them here.
Happy organizing and here is a neat infographic, ‘How to Prioritize Your Inbox‘ from NetCredit that gives some excellent tips:
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