Organizing your Email Inbox
For many people, the email inbox is the foundation of their social and professional connection to others. It’s the simplest and most popular tool for communicating with others online, staying up to date with news and events, and managing one’s workflow. So, just like a physical workspace, keeping your inbox organized is essential to being productive and providing timely responses to emails. In this Island, I’ll suggest some methods and tools that can help you organize your inbox and manage your workflow.
Use folders/labels: Using an inbox without folders and labels is like saving all your files to your desktop, or using Google Drive without folders - it’s messy and it’s going to cost you in the long run. I recommend creating folders for at least the major categories that you’ll probably be getting plenty of emails for - e.g., School, Travel, Work, Health/Bills - and storing the emails relevant to those subjects in their folders. This will have the immediate effect of clearing up your inbox while also making it much easier to actually find those emails later on. You never know when some old email will suddenly become important for you to find, but having emails sorted into the relevant labels and placed in their own folders will save you a ton of time. Gmail makes this very easy to do. Most email hosts, such as Gmail or Outlook, also have organizing tools like “Rules” that can auto-sort emails into these folders based on the criteria you provide.
Minimize subscriptions and promotional emails: Don’t subscribe to every newsletter you see, but pick those that you’ll actually read and provide value. Although it’s annoying, take the time to click unsubscribe to any marketing or promotional emails you don’t actually want. These spammy emails are the quickest way to a cluttered inbox.
Make a “sign-up” email address: Many websites, services, and surveys will ask you to enter an email to sign-up. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of having to later unsubscribe from their emails, it can be useful to have a go-to secondary email address. Use that for all those sign-ups and keep your primary email for more important matters. The secondary email address can be used whenever you have to give an email for something you don’t want to receive emails from, effectively acting as your primary email’s bouncer.
Streak: There are many workflow management tools out there, but one of my favorites for managing emails is Streak. Some of its features include reminders for emails you haven’t replied to in several days and schedule send so you can immediately write out replies and decide when they’ll actually be sent out. My favorite email organization tool, and it’s free to use!
Remove unneeded emails: Get rid of all emails from your inbox that have been dealt with or aren’t relevant to you any longer. You can do this by moving them to a folder, archiving them, or simply deleting them. It can be tempting to leave emails unopened or un-archived because you want to get to them...eventually. But keeping emails in your inbox that you have no real plans to reply to or check again is just taking unnecessary mental and visual space. If you can’t bring yourself to delete them, then at least move them to a folder titled “Saved for later”!
These tips are just the beginning of the ways you can better organize your email inbox to improve your workflow and focus. Just like any other productivity advice, different strategies work better for different people. You know yourself best, so just like you would design your physical workspace or structure your study time to your needs, do the same with your inbox! Future you will thank you for streamlining your digital - and mental - space.
