Manage your email inbox before it manages you!
My planners are where all my relevant information gets stored (from the 3 R’s below)
Imagine only spending 17 minutes a day in your email and using those 17 minutes so well that you didn’t need to be in your inbox for the rest of the day. How amazing would that be?
Well that’s exactly what productivity expert Tiago Forte does. After reading his blog post I started re-thinking how I manage my emails for good. You can read his blog post here.
How do you manage your emails?
How many emails do you have in your inbox right now from subscriptions that you signed up to years ago?
How many emails do you look forward to receiving and then read in full (maybe more than once)?
How often do your roll your eyes when a particular email comes in because you know it will take a while to work out what you need to do?
Email is great as a form of instant communication when used well but, more often than not, it can create information overload. Then there are too many flashing things getting your mental attention and before you know it ignoring email altogether feels like an appropriate response.
When it comes to my personal email inbox here is what I do to manage it and keep it simple on a day-to-day basis.
Email contains one of three types of information: Relevant information, reference information and then rubbish. So what do you do with these three things? Here’s what:
1. Relevant information – these emails are the ones you need to action. If there is an event it gets added to the calendar. If there is something that involves a lot of steps then I like to create a separate note in my notes app or in my planner or on Gmail. I will then set up reminders either on planner or in my Google Calendar to check in with my notes (this is part of my weekly review). The main point here is to actually DO something with the information that is in your email so that you don’t need to keep opening the email again. I open my emails then take the information out and file/label the email for later just in case I ever need to go back into it. This stops me from living in my emails and creating overwhelm.
2. Reference information – these are emails that contain information that is useful for certain things, but you don’t need to actually DO anything. I file these into folders with names that help me to remember where they are. Something I’ve started doing recently is adding labels to emails rather than filing them. You can add more than one label to an email which means it is easier to find things if you can’t remember what folder they might be in (search entries don’t always pull every email from every folder). If you use Microsoft Outlook you can create smart search folders so for example if you create smart search folder called work, every time you label an email as work it will go into that folder. You could also create another smart search folder called projects and every email labelled projects would automatically be moved there. Emails with more than one label would automatically be saved in each file.
3. Rubbish – this one speaks for itself yet so many people leave trash emails in their inboxes. If an email is useless get in the habit of deleting it when you see it. If you worry about going into a black hole of emails then create a strict 30 minute block once a week (or as needed) when you can go through and delete rubbish emails but be sure not do anything else! If you leave too many rubbish emails in your inbox your subconscious knows that many of them are useless and eventually your brain becomes numb to email because it turns into one big mess. Start small and start tackling the email that are easy to delete it. You will slowly form the habit of deleting junk and end up with only useful emails and feel much more peaceful as a result.
Do you feel like you have a tonne of emails related to newsletters and marketing emails that you receive as a result of not ticking the opt out box when you shop online?
If like me, you find that you have a never-ending supply of email newsletters, & don’t remember signing up to many of them, you can clear them all in one go by using websites such as: https://unroll.me/.
Once you create an account for each email address you have you will be able to see all the emails that you are signed up to and you can delete the ones you don’t want. You can even organise to get one summary email for all the subscriptions that you do have but setting up a Roll-Up.
This is how I went from having over 225 email subscriptions to having just 14. I only receive emails that I really want and it is so much better for my sanity! I may not get the instant dopamine hit of having constant emails but now when I do get an email, I know it’s something that I actually want to read and that, for me, is the goal of email.
What are your favourite tips for managing email? I’d love to know