Email Management: 7 Tips to Organize Your Inbox

Email management is any strategy meant to organize, declutter, and otherwise make it easier to handle the steady stream of emails you receive on a daily basis. Usually, it requires both traditional time management strategies alongside digital savvy to make your email program or provider do some of the work for you. While it might take a lot of time up front to implement these strategies, you’ll also save time in the long run.

Once you get the hang of email management, a wide array of incoming messages will be less cause for anxiety. Here are just three of the benefits you can expect from learning to manage your emails well:

• Greater focus: Crafting an effective email management strategy enables you to cut down on multitasking and increase your focus in other areas. The closer you get to inbox zero, the less you’ll find yourself distracted by the constant backlog of old emails and the steady drip of new ones. This greatly improves your workflow and ability to stay completely devoted to the task at hand at any given time.
• Improved communication: Managing email services well allows you to communicate more effectively with coworkers, family, and personal friends. Once you declutter your inbox, you have more time for reading emails to which you would like to craft thoughtful responses. Balance out which emails need personalized replies, which can do with templated ones, and which need no responses at all.
• More free time: After you learn how to manage your incoming emails well, the amount of time you’ll have for other tasks will increase dramatically. Rather than spend hours scrolling past subject lines, you’ll be able to approach your email account with a greater sense of control and time management.

There are numerous ways to take control of your inbox. Try these seven effective email management strategies for getting things done:

1. 1. Delete emails when you can. One of the simplest email management hacks is to delete new emails as soon as possible. You can even leave some unread as you remove them from your archives. The key is to look for unwanted promotional emails, spam, and other unnecessary correspondence. Procrastinating on this will cause your inbox to fill up quickly, and you might soon find yourself more overwhelmed than if you’d combed through and deleted messages more quickly.
2. 2. Deploy templated responses. Sometimes you can quickly respond to a more formal email with a canned response. While you should strive to always give personalized messages a similarly unique reply, many more formal emails only require a brief, templated response. Keep a set of email templates for these occasions (e.g., confirming your receipt of an email, thanking someone for reaching out, and so on), along with a templated email signature to save time when drafting replies.
3. 3. Prioritize important emails. Whenever you check your email, gauge how important it is to reply to any specific message with an especially quick follow-up. For example, you might need to respond to a customer support request with a greater degree of immediacy than chiming in on a group email with coworkers. Cater your email response time to your other priorities. You might even suggest a phone call if something especially urgent comes up.
4. 4. Specify a time to read and answer emails. Rather than trying to respond to all emails in real time, consider setting aside a specific time per day to go through your inbox. During this time, you can file certain emails appropriately, email clients and coworkers, and respond to others. The number of email notifications a person receives on a daily basis can feel overwhelming, so it can be helpful to dedicate an hour at the start or end of the day to handle your accounts with a little less pressure.
5. 5. Try different filters. Use email management software and plugins to sort emails you receive in real time. By applying filters to certain senders, you can allow automation to grant you a more organized inbox. For example, if you use just one account for both your work and personal emails, filters can help distinguish the two types and send them both to relevant folders automatically.
6. 6. Unsubscribe from certain senders. Certain email management systems and software enable you to go through all your subscriptions and unsubscribe from certain senders. Too many subscriptions can clutter up your inbox and make it much harder to respond to everyone you need to on a given day. Unsubscribing from certain newsletters and promos helps prevent your inbox from getting too swollen.
7. 7. Use multiple folders. Do your best to file unread emails into relevant folders based on the need for a response, type of email, and other useful designations. You can also use entirely different email accounts for different purposes to this end. This approach is especially useful if you have a shared inbox with additional team members.

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