It’s very common to procrastinate on dealing with your email chaos.
Does this sound familiar to you?
- You dread sitting down at your desk to look at email.
- You stay at your desk longer every day to try to stay on top of your inbox.
- The size of your inbox keeps increasing.
- You have not just emails from your co-workers, clients, friends, and family, but also emails from school lists, notifications from social networks, and newsletters from retailers, vendors, and consultants (including mine! Sign up on the right sidebar).
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to miss important communication due to email chaos.
Email is still an important communication tool but email chaos continues to increase every year. It’s no longer possible to treat your inbox like it’s a to-do list that keeps growing and growing…
Many of us use an email reader like Microsoft Outlook, but in recent years webmail has become more common, particularly Gmail. There are ways to manage your email chaos whether you’re using Outlook, Apple Mail, or Gmail.
Here are my suggestions to get a handle on your email chaos:
The first thing to do is to create email folders.
These are to serve as repositories for less important emails as they come in. You don’t want those newsletters from your neighborhood grocery store taking up space in your inbox. You may want to read about this week’s specials when you have time, so don’t unsubscribe, manage your inbox instead.
I suggest creating a folder for each email list that you’re a member of, a folder for social network notifications, a folder for each category of newsletter, and a folder for “deferred” items. The point is to keep your inbox sparse enough so that you’re not spending a lot of time daily going through looking for the important emails. (And go ahead: unsubscribe from any newsletters or marketing emails that you don’t care about).
In Apple Mail, folders are called “Mailboxes”. In Gmail, they’re called “Labels”.
After you’ve created folders, the next step is to create “filters” – automatic programs that run within your email reader.
Filters search for specific criteria, which you define, as your email arrives and then perform a defined action based on those criteria. For example, your filter can search the “from” field for your grocery store name and then save the email to a specific folder that you’ve created in step one.
If you use Apple Mail, you create the filters using “Rules” under “Preferences” or using the “Smart Mailbox” feature. (Creating a Smart Mailbox creates a “mailbox” for emails that fit the rules but doesn’t move the original emails out of the Inbox). Apple Mail also has a useful “VIP” feature that creates folders for your favorite people – when you open an email from a favorite person, click on the star next to the “from” line.
If you use Outlook, filters are called “Rules.”
Once you have your folders and filters set up, you should see a big improvement with your email chaos. The next step for Inbox management is to flag your emails with priority levels (Gmail uses colored stars), and then to sort your Inbox by priority, so that you can deal with your most important emails first.
This is not as easy as it sounds. How do you “deal with” those important emails, since some of the emails just require a response, but often they require creating a follow-up task?
There are ways to integrate your email system with a task management system, and I will address that in a later blog post. Stay posted!
Finally, you need to set up your email management routine, preferably by adding time into your calendar.
I suggest blocking out some time every day to:
- Priorize and flag your emails
- Deal with the most important emails, or create follow-up tasks
- Move less important emails to a “Later” folder.
I also suggest blocking out some time every week to deal with the “Later” emails and to do clean-out of your other folders.
If you have a consistent routine, then you’ll find that you’ve become efficient and responsive with your email management. No more apologizing: “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see your email”!
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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”
