Email is the bane of many peoples existence. Especially at work it can cause anxiety and stress. You stare at the number of unread emails and worry about what you’re missing and how you’ll ever catch up. Some people don’t get stressed about their email. They work towards something called inbox zero. Inbox zero means getting to a point where you have no emails in your inbox at the end of the day. This is completely possible, but can be a challenge. Here are some tips to help you manage your email, without the stress.
Timing
Almost nothing that you get in your inbox is an emergency. In fact, most things in your inbox probably don’t need your attention at all. That means you don’t need to open your email and leave it open all day. Instead try reviewing your email at set times during the day. Maybe start with opening and checking each hour for anything that needs immediate attention and then closing the app completely. Try to extend the amount of time between checks until you get to a point where you are only checking first thing in the morning and then again an hour before the end of your shift.
Organization
Some folks have no sub folders and others have dozens of highly specialized folders for filing their emails away. I recommend an approach in the middle. I have my inbox, an Important folder, a follow-up folder and a personal folder. Anything that I want to keep goes into my Important folder. If I need to respond to something the same day, it will stay in my inbox, but if I can get to it later, I’ll add a follow-up flag and drop it into the follow-up folder. If I receive praise or something personal, that goes into my personal folder. Anything that doesn’t meet that criteria is deleted. For example, if I’ve been CC’d on some email chain that I have no need to reply to or refer back to? That would be deleted.
Follow-ups
If you are not going to respond to an email the same day, I recommend flagging it for follow-up and dropping it into a follow-up folder. Flagging for follow-up means you add a time based reminder or flag that will resurface the email later when you need to respond to it. For example, you might make a calendar invite, or in outlook you can “Schedule” an email for later today, tomorrow, or next week. I also use Slack to set reminders to tell me to follow up with this task or that task.
Honesty
There is a tendency to hoard email. I might need this again someday. I might need every single email in this thread, just in case! Let’s be honest though. You probably have thousands of emails in your inbox that you barely read the first time, dropped into a folder, or left in your inbox... and never looked at it again. It’s time to take stock. Go back and look at the emails you’ve saved and never used. Why did you keep them and why didn’t you use them? Use that information going forward to make honest calls about whether to file an email for later or delete them without regrets.
Spam and Unsubscribe
You get a ton of emails that you don’t want. They boost up the unread counts, take longer for you to get your inbox cleared out and only add to your anxiety. Take some time over the next week or so and ruthlessly mark those emails as spam and unsubscribe to those mailing lists. In Outlook, just mark it as Junk and it will never show up in your inbox again. There is usually an unsubscribe link in emails. Tap it and follow the directions on the web page to unsubscribe. In Gmail you can hit the Spam button and it will delete it and ask if you want to unsubscribe. Just tape yes and follow the prompts.
Set up some rules
Let the email program manage much of your workflow for you. Do you get an email that you know you’ll always want to save but won’t require a response? Do you get emails you know need a response but it doesn’t have to be done today? What about emails you get that you know you can just delete? Take some time to set up inbox rules to handle these tasks for you. Using rules you can have emails from specific senders, subjects etc that then get marked as read, flagged for follow-up, deleted or placed into specific folders. This not only reduces the time you have to spend dealing with your inbox, but gets things where they need to go automatically.
What tips do you have to manage your inbox? Tell me below!
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