How much of your day do you spend dealing with emails? If you’re anything like me, you spend far too much of it reading and deleting – particularly the latter. Some of it isn’t controllable – as a blogger and journalist, 50% of my emails are press releases. But other bits can be removed or redistributed elsewhere to deal with.
Dealing with an overwhelming inbox? Here are my top tips for getting it back under control:
- Unsubscribe from the ones you no longer read. You can either do this as and when you get them, or leave your inbox for a couple of days and unsubscribe from a whole batch. Most emails have an unsubscribe button at the bottom. If not, drop the sender a quick email to ask if they could remove you from their list.
- Set up some email filters. Check out my post on setting up email filers to find out how. I’ve got filters for daily deals, LinkedIn alerts, Google Alerts and sale alerts (the latter is more about saving my money than my sanity).
- Got 400 unread emails from earlier this year? Delete them. If you haven’t read them by now, you probably never will. And if they were really important, someone would have followed up on them by now. Delete, delete, delete.
- While you’re in your email, have a look at your signature. Is it up-to-date? I rather like WiseStamp for this.
What’s your inbox detox plan?
I try hard to keep amy inbox sane, as I found if it isn’t in a good state, neither am I!
My tip is to train yourself to only look in the folders once a day or once a week, depending on what’s in them.