Email De-Cluttering

Are you someone who keeps every email you have ever gotten in your inbox? Do you find yourself looking for an old email and having to dig through everything just to find out? Then this post is for YOU!

We do so much of our important correspondence, bill pay confirmations, etc. online these days so it's important to be able to quickly and easily find what you're looking for and also be able to know when you have handled these important tasks. There are many time-sensitive items that come to us in our emails and depending on what type of business you are in, this could be the difference between a sale or not.

It may seem daunting but the first step is to create folders! You can create as many as you want to help you feel organized. For me, I’m a little more extreme so I have at least 50 at work and 50 on my personal email but you can start small and simple and have generic ones such as HOME, PERSONAL, TAX INFO, KIDS, etc. For me these have sub-folders such as one for each child under KIDS, one for each client under CLIENTS and under TAX INFO I have each year so I can easily compile what I need each year quickly. Start simple and then create folders and sub-folders for the types of emails you generally see the most of. If your mind works more by year or you’ve just got ALOT of email right now, think about grouping it by year or by quarter to get it out of your inbox until you have time to sort or delete (and I promise you, the likelihood you need an email from 3 years ago is about zero so the delete button is your friend.

The next step is the hard part for most of you. You are going to need to go through your inbox and handle each email that is left.

For those emails you have responded to and need to hold onto, file them away in one of your newly created folders. For those you have responded to but don’t need, DELETE them! The DELETE button is your friend in this case. If it’s junk, DELETE it! If you get a lot of junk mail you can start the process of unsubscribing or you can go to a service such as unrollme.com and have most of the junk mail condensed into one daily email from them. Your inbox should only keep those things you need to be able to get to and area CURRENTLY handling or those you haven’t gotten to yet. It is not a holding place for every email you have ever received!

I promise you the simple process of clearing out your email will do 2 things: clear your mind and keep you from forgetting to handle important tasks or respond to important people! So what are those simple steps again:

1 – Create folders that make sense for your life and the emails you tend to get

2 – Go through your inbox and FILE or DELETE

3 – DELETE junk mail!

4 – Keep the process going! Don’t do it for one day and then you don’t touch the system again until you have 300 emails in your inbox.