Remember that cute 80’s movie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan?  The mystery, the romance, the excitement of using this new medium to communicate?  Back in the day, each time that little “ding” went off you had that Pavlovian response of excitement and surprise.  Yeah, not so much anymore…Now, I’m more likely to cringe when I see all the mail in my inbox and often feel overwhelmed by it.  While organizing and managing your email won’t find you true love (probably), getting a handle on your digital mail can make your life a lot less stressful.

Here are some tips to get started to declutter your inbox.

  • Create Folders so you can file away emails to quickly find them in the future.  Related to Suzy’s soccer? Just drag anything into the folder and you can always go back and reference the schedule at another time.
  • Unsubscribe to email newsletters you signed up with good intentions but that’s not getting the information read.  Unsubscribe if you know you can’t prioritize this.
  • Create a rule.  You can designate a particular folder for certain emails to be downloaded to vs. the inbox.  Want anything related to shopping to go into a particular folder? Create a rule so it doesn’t clutter your inbox and your really important emails don’t get lost.
  • Don’t just delete, unsubscribe.  Yes, it’s quicker just to delete but if you scroll to the bottom of those pesky marketing emails, you’ll see the “unsubscribe” button.  Take 5 minutes a day to unsubscribe online and stop unwanted and unneeded emails from arriving in the first place.
  • Delete unneeded file folders.  Did you create an email file folder for Sam’s 4th grade class info?  Great.  But now he’s heading to high school so it’s time to delete that folder….
  • Use an email manager like Outlook from Office365.  Going into multiple inboxes/mail managers multiple times a day is time consuming and unproductive.  Work with your IT professional to set up a mail manager that’ll work best for you.
  • Do not use your inbox as your filing system.  So often, clients like to keep EVERYTHING in their inbox so they can find it quickly (quickly being a relative word…)  Periodically, roughly every couple of months, do an email purge.  Review the emails by date, by sender, by subject – whichever makes more sense to you – and then delete the unneeded and move the ones you really need to keep into named folders.  Yes, this will take some time.  Yes, you will get bored to tears with this.  And yes, you must do it.
  • By all that is holy, back up your data.  I’ll cover this topic in another post soon but be sure you are backing up your mail messages.  In the cloud, on an external harddrive, somewhere and ideally multiples places.  You cannot rely on your mail provider to be able to recreate all of these emails for you if your system crashes.

Like those adorable Yuppies stumbling toward true love, we’re all moving toward something.  An empty inbox isn’t the goal because it’s nearly impossible.  What you’re striving for in managing and organizing your email is being able to find what you need quickly and easily.  That’s what organizing is:  finding my stuff when I need it so I can go do the things I really want to do.  So get out there and get going…