Peace of Mind Organizing

Staying on top of your email inbox

19 December 2016

I’m struck by how similar our email inboxes are to physical clutter. Many people deal with physical clutter, but I bet even those who manage to keep a tidy home have email inbox clutter.

Here are some of the similarities I see between a bulging email inbox and a cluttered home:

• Both clutter up your mind.
• Both make it harder to be efficient.
• The idea of tackling either can be overwhelming.
• Order can be maintained in both with daily action.
• Decluttering both can be achieved in small bits of time.
• Clutter in both is frequently the result of delayed decisions.
• Having an under-control inbox and a tidy home both feel great!

I try hard to empty my email inbox on a regular basis. (I wish I could say I do it daily but, these days, it’s more like weekly.) I went through my big email existential crisis in October and since then staying on top of email has become a lot easier.

Here are a few things I do to make sure the email doesn’t get out of control:

• I delete as much as possible and archive the rest. Now that I have an IMAP email server, archiving just takes a single click and the email is out of my inbox.
• I try to respond right away to any email that requires a response, ideally on the day it was received. Then I delete or archive the email.
• I forward emails that require later action to Evernote, then attach a reminder to them so the email is put in front of me, in the form of an email and an Evernote reminder, on a specified date and time. (If you use gmail, I think the Boomerang app does the same thing.)
• When the email inbox starts filling up (for me, that means more than 50 emails), I use a timer to get me on track. I typically set a goal number of emails (say, ten) and try to get my inbox down to that number by the time the timer goes off. Usually, I don’t set the timer for more then five or ten minutes at a time.
• I unsubscribe like crazy to newsletters and promotional emails. Unsubscribing is almost as easy as just deleting them. (For gmail users, the app unroll.me makes even easier.)

Like keeping a tidy home, the secret to keeping your email inbox lean is to not hang on to too much, to have a place to put emails away, and to spend a few minutes daily throwing and putting stuff away. When you do that, you can find what you need, when you need it, and not lose important emails or documents.

Isn’t that worth a little effort? It doesn’t have to be hard.

Tagged with: clutter, clutter clearing, email, habits, productivity

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