Time Management Tips: Organizing emails
It’s the terrifying thought when you open your phone, desktop, tablet, or laptop and you have hundreds of unread emails in your inbox. Some are spam, some are related to work, and others are related to friends and relatives. Technology should help make our lives better by saving us time. Everyone has his own way to personalize his inbox as everyone employs a different system (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Yandex, Hotmail, etc). Rachael Doyle in Organize your Business: Organize your life describes seventeen ideas on how to organize your inbox emails like a pro no matter what system you currently use. The following ideas are ideas that I use combined with many ideas from Rachael Doyle.
Idea 1: Don’t become terrified by the thought of a full inbox. Check your email daily, the first thing in the morning, and organize it every day.
Idea 2: Create Multiple email accounts but consolidate them in one system: I find creating multiple email accounts to be especially beneficial when you want to separate among subscriptions to list mails and digests from work and personal email.
Idea 3: Archive emails quarterly. This way you keep your inbox clean without having to delete emails that are not useful anymore.
Idea 4: Have a category take some time to create all categories related to your work, subscriptions, family, friends, business, and others. Then create subfolders of each category. ex: projects, travels, website,…
Idea 5: keep, delete, or complete after you finish reading an email. Those are the three actions that you should consider immediately after you finish reading an email. Always try to avoid snoozing emails for later.
Idea 6: Color code to reduce the load based on who sent the mail. For example, you can choose a “green” color code for emails coming from your superior, a “blue” color code for CC emails, “red” color code for emails sent to you directly.
Idea 7: Draw the line is another way to differentiate emails from their subject by making sure that your subject line is as specific as possible. Also, make sure to change incoming and responding emails subject to one you can easily track.
Idea 8: Negate notifications to avoid getting notifications about social media posts that you commented on (Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Twitter). Each time you comment on a post Facebook keeps sending you emails about who else has just commented. This can be avoided by visiting the social media platform and turning off the notification function.
Idea 9: Create rules and filters to help sort incoming emails but also create default responses to common questions (like using the function Quick Parts in Microsoft Outlook).
Idea 10: Always unsubscribe from your unwanted email lists.