Many workers struggle to keep up with their inbox on a daily basis – small business owners especially. When you spend most of your time trying to stay ahead of all your messages, it is easy for some “housekeeping” aspects of your mailbox to fall by the wayside. But it is important to keep your inbox organized, just as it is important to keep your workspace organized, as it can drastically increase your productivity.
Of course, everyone’s working styles are different. What may seem cluttered to one business owner may be exactly how another business owner prefers to operate. So something as tedious as organizing your email may not seem like a priority, but ask yourself: Have you ever needed to reference an email from days, weeks, months, or even years ago? How easy was it to find? How much time would it have saved to have things more organized?
Below are three simple ways you can create a more organized life for your email:
1. Create folders and sub-folders
Most email platforms provide the opportunity for this basic level of organization. Keeping all your mails in one place until you delete them is not recommended, especially for small business owners who often have their hands in several different projects at once.
How you label your folders largely depends on your business and working style, but one way to start is to think of your work in “sections,” and divide those sections accordingly. For example, emails regarding your finances are not the same as emails about a specific customer request. By dividing your emails into logical folders, it makes it so much easier to find and reference messages later.
2. Regularly purge unnecessary messages
Every email user knows about spam messages, and probably knows to delete them as soon as they arrive in the inbox. However, one cause of cluttered inboxes is email that was necessary at one time, but you will never need to reference again. These emails are things like simple questions to co-workers, personal conversations, or old and outdated meeting requests. These messages can clutter inboxes, folders, and sub-folders and make it difficult to find an important message later on. Take a few minutes each week and delete any messages that you know you will never need to reference.
3. Prevent unwanted messages
While spam folders do a good job of filtering out a great deal of unwanted messages, a big contributor to cluttered email are newsletters that you either knowingly or unknowingly subscribed to in the past. Keep an eye on your inbox, and if you start to notice that you receive a lot of newsletters that are no longer beneficial to you, just unsubscribe. This will stop the messages from wasting precious seconds of your time down the road.
Additionally, you can consider establishing filtering rules for some emails. For example, you can “train” your email platform to automatically group certain messages together in sub-folders for you, reducing the time it takes to organize later.
Photo Credit: ©fotalia.com/beboy