It’s very easy for your email inbox to get out of hand. The more regularly you use email, the worse the problem can be. In a cluttered inbox, important and time-sensitive emails are easily lost among spam and emails of little interest. Taming your inbox can be difficult and time-consuming. If you’re not particularly tech savvy or good at organization in general, the task can see daunting.
It’s incredibly important to reduce the clutter in your email inbox in order to help simplify your life and lower your stress levels. Here are some tips for cleaning up your email inbox now.
1. Create Folders
If you allow all your email to mix and mingle in one main feed, it will be easy to misplace emails. It will take up lots of your precious time as you try to locate certain messages amongst everything else.
The best thing you can do to simplify your email is to create folders. Folders can be as specific as you like, and they’ll help you to organize everything. Create folders for emails that need to be responded to immediately, emails that you’re saving for future reference, and more. The most important part is to file your emails immediately. As soon as you read an email, move it to the appropriate folder.
2. Crack Down on Spam
Lots of spam email can quickly clutter your email inbox. You’re likely receiving spam email from the same companies over and over again, so identify those and take the necessary steps to unsubscribe from them. You’ll usually find an “unsubscribe” link in the body of the email.
If you can’t do that, add each spam email to a blacklist that will cause them to go directly to your spam folder. In the future, be very careful when you give out your email address and avoid subscribing to unnecessary newsletters or alerts. If spam continues to be a problem, download additional spam-filtering software such as MailWasher or Spam Sieve.
3. Use Additional Accounts
A good way to simplify your email is by creating additional email accounts. Use your primary email account only for important business contacts and communicating with friends and family.
Use another account for registering with websites, and yet another for subscribing to lists, especially for shopping notifications and coupon newsletters. Using more than one email account will help separate the types of email you receive before they even reach your inboxes. It will help ensure that your main email account doesn’t end up accumulating less important messages.
4. Set Aside Time
In order to de-clutter your email inbox, it’s important to stay on top of your messages and deal with them as they arrive, rather than waiting for them to pile up to an unmanageable level. Manage your inbox on a regular basis. Set aside a specific time everyday to check your inbox and go through your messages, sorting and deleting as you go.
Also budget time every day for replying to important emails. By keeping up with the messages you receive on a daily basis, you’ll be significantly reducing clutter-induced headaches in the future.
If you know more tricks to reduce the clutter from the email inbox then share with us via comments below.
