How to Manage Your Inbox Like a Pro

Listen on Spotify.

Is your inbox full of messages you haven’t had a chance to read? Is opening your messages something you have come to dread? Wish there was a way you could manage your inbox like a pro?

Luckily for you, there are ways you can organise your inbox so you can find messages you need quickly and easily. You can delete messages you don’t need in a trice, too.

When you have the right strategy in place, it is easy to achieve a clutter-free inbox.

In the rest of this article, we’ll share some useful tips on how to get your inbox ship-shape, so that you never again have to dread what will face you when you open your mail.

Let’s jump right in.

Top Tips for Managing Your Email 

Here are our top tips for sorting out your inbox. Follow them and you’ll become a wizard at managing your email in no time at all. You’ll be able to keep track of events and keep up with the latest news. You may even find you become more proficient at your job over time.

Regularly Organise Your Emails

Nobody likes to be interrupted when working on something tricky, right? Notifications and alerts can quickly become annoying. This leads many to switch off such notifications and end up ignoring emails. This is a good move in the short term, but if you end up ignoring them for too long, they can soon become an unimaginable pile of messages you can’t face getting to grips with.

So, how should you deal with your email?

Plan to check your email at set times throughout the day. Use time blocking to help you do this. You can devote a block of 15 minutes to responding to emails and deleting any which don’t need a response.

Don’t spend overlong on individual emails. Remember, if you want to keep emails that don’t need a response, archive them so you can focus on messages you do need to reply to. If you’re unsure how to deal with them, star them so you can return to them later.

Now, we’ll share tips on how to organise each popular type of inbox.

Gmail

• Quickly spot important messages by using labels. You can separate work emails from personal messages and archive messages you need to keep for future reference.

Outlook

• When you want to see and respond to emails sent by a specific person, use the Sweep feature. The Sweep feature allows you to create a rule that sorts messages sent by a specific individual to a specified folder. You can also use the existing folders and categories in Outlook to keep your inbox organised.

iCloud

• One advantage of organising your iCloud inbox is that you can save storage space and have more space to store music, files, videos, and photos. To help with this process, you can block unwanted emails and block delete those you’ve already dealt with.

Yahoo Mail

• To organise Yahoo mail, you can create folders and then set up filters to send messages into each of the folders as you desire.

Organise Your Inbox Using Labels and Folders

You should delete as many messages as you can, even if you have unlimited memory. The fewer emails you have in your mailbox, the quicker you can find the message you’re after. But what about those emails you can’t delete?

That’s where folders and labels come in.

You can think of folders as being like drawers, where you can deposit emails so that they don’t fill your inbox. You can create folders for everything from social media notifications, to work emails and messages from friends and family.

Gmail is a little different. Alongside folders, labels are used to order and categorise messages in your mailbox. They work like post-it notes. When you assign a label to messages they don’t move. That means a single message can have multiple labels attached to it, but it will only appear in one folder.

When you’ve learnt how to use folders in Gmail, you can use labels to categorise messages and keep your inbox ship-shape.

Archive Messages to Clear Your Mailbox

Email users have more options nowadays than ever before. Most providers allow users to archive messages. This is a way of hiding messages you are not prepared to delete. You can return to such messages later. Just remember to clean up your archive folder occasionally.

You can automate this process which will clear your archived messages every 30 days, or you can sort and clear the messages manually.

Use Stars and Flags to Sort Emails

Some email providers have a feature that allows you to flag and star emails, to distinguish them from other messages in your inbox.

Here’s how to do it.

• In Gmail, click on the star icon to the left of the message to star an email.
• In Outlook, you can flag a message by hovering your mouse over it and clicking the flag icon.

Some providers allow users to flag messages according to urgency.

Don’t be tempted to flag too many messages, though. If too many messages are starred it can make it tricky to work out which are important.

Set up Multiple Email Accounts

Many providers offer excellent email services, so why limit yourself to just one? Having more than one account makes messages far easier to organise. Here are some tips for organising messages across different accounts.

• Use disposable email accounts for added security. Crucially, though, make sure you don’t use disposable accounts for anything vital.
• You might choose to have an account for work messages, one for personal messages, and one for notifications, subscriptions, or announcements about upcoming events.

Use Email Rules

Email rules can help you pinpoint the sender of emails, sort them by subject line or recipient and direct them to the appropriate folder. These rules are also called filters and are a feature of many email providers.

The downside of email rules is that they can be tricky to set up. To get around this problem, you can use the Clean Email app. The app will set up rules automatically and automate tasks like combining and grouping emails to make cleaning your inbox faster. It can also automate oft-repeated tasks.

Review your Email Organisation Strategy from Time to Time

When you organise emails, consider your approach and make little adjustments as needed to improve it until you have the perfect system in place. Soon you’ll be managing emails like a pro, and more productive than ever as a result.

Unsubscribe from Unwanted Emails

This is really the one tip to rule them all. It proves harder for some than for others. When you’re looking through your messages take a moment to unsubscribe from emails you never read anyway. If the content you’ve subscribed to isn’t providing entertainment or something interesting, unsubscribe and move on.

Remember, some of the things you’re subscribed to can likely be Googled anyway.

Subscriptions like what?

• Event calendars.
• Promotions.
• Newsletters.
• Blog notifications.

Instead of cluttering up your inbox, unsubscribe to things and create space in your inbox. Better yet, don’t subscribe to stuff in the first place unless you know you want it in your inbox.

Use Pre-Written Responses

You can save time by writing several batch responses and saving them. That way you can enter them with a single click when next such a response is called for.

This could save you time in several scenarios, like when you’re emailing customer services to check the status of an online order, for instance, or to speed up dealing with standard work emails.

Do this to save time and energy, so you can use it doing work that’s more valuable and truly matters.

Use the Snooze Feature

Messages don’t always arrive at a convenient time.

Typically, you can deal with this in two ways:

• Stop what you’re doing and deal with the message.
•  Ignore the message and come back to it later.

If you interrupt yourself, your productivity may plummet because you lose track of your original task. If you choose to leave messages until later, you risk forgetting about it altogether or leaving them too long before you compose a response.

You may not realise there is also a third option. You can snooze the emails. The snooze feature removes emails for a while but makes them appear there when you have time to respond to them, meaning they won’t interrupt your flow when working. This may do wonders for your productivity.

Now it’s time to find out what we shouldn’t do if we want to manage email well.

What Not to Do if you Want to Manage Your Email

Here are a couple of tips as to what you shouldn’t do if you want to organise your inbox.

Don’t Use Organising Email as an Excuse to Procrastinate

You know how it feels when you’re overwhelmed with a project at work, but still need to feel like you’re working and so turn to other tasks that feel like work but accomplish little?

Well, don’t use organising emails as an excuse to procrastinate. We discussed in an earlier post how sneaky habits can be a form of procrastination. We didn’t list organising email as one of those habits, but it most certainly qualifies. So don’t procrastinate by sorting your emails. Instead, take a break to refresh yourself. Go for a walk, read a book, or do anything you enjoy.

This is far more productive than merely pretending to work, and you will feel more motivated when you do return to work.

Remember, nothing is black and white. So, don’t waste time on trivial, non-urgent tasks when you have more pressing ones to deal with. Just deal with your most important messages and leave others till later.

If You Want to Sort Your Inbox, Don’t Obsess Over It

If you check email multiple times a day, so much so that you feel compelled to do so, you need to hold back.

Remember, not every email needs an answer, or even deserves one.

Banish any guilt you may feel whenever you don’t check your email. You could always let people know they can text you with anything urgent. Answer your email only when it suits you. Don’t become a slave to your inbox.

Wrapping Up

We’ve covered some crucial dos and don’ts if you want to become a wizard at dealing with email. Whether you choose to use the snooze feature or learn to become a dab hand at archiving messages, we hope you have the confidence to banish email-related guilt, unsubscribe from unwanted messages, and manage your inbox like a pro. Soon, you’ll be more productive than ever.

If you enjoyed this post, check out our post on how to conquer decision fatigue and plan your week like a boss. You may find it helpful. Thanks for reading.