Take Charge of Your Inbox Before it Overtakes Your Workday  

If you are like most American workers, you spend about a quarter (28%) of each work day reading and responding to emails, according to a 2012 report by McKinsey & Company. Considering the swell of new users glued to their smartphones since 2012, coupled with the fact that the McKinsey survey only accounted for the actual 8 hour workday—not the time spent on the couch at home checking work emails– and that percentage is undoubtedly higher.

Although email is a useful tool for communicating with employees, vendors and customers alike, your inbox can feel like a cinder block weighing you down. Do you thrill with joy or cringe in despair at the 4,000 unanswered email in your inbox?

That inbox equals 4,000 tasks that you have avoided until now. Most of those emails probably don’t require your undivided attention. Despite spam filters, unwanted or unimportant emails somehow find their way to your inbox. Sometimes, unwanted emails are the result of well-meaning people wanting to “keep you in the loop” on a project with which you are only peripherally involved. Others are solicitations from people or companies with whom you used to do business or be connected. If your tendency is to leave those emails in your inbox “just in case,” you just added another pound of weight to your drooping shoulders.

It’s time to lighten up!

Email should be a tool you use, not a burden you bear. You can swiftly lighten your email load by following four easy steps. You can remember them because without these steps, your mouse finger becomes S.O.R.E. from scrolling 4,000 emails looking for the one your need that you know you “just read” recently.

Sweep. Sweeping your inbox involves swiftly removing clutter so you can buy yourself some time to breathe without that massive number of emails staring you in the face. Then, you can get down to today’s business.

Think of the ten-second tidying that you do when a friend or family member announces they will arrive at your doorstep in 20 minutes. Somehow, you manage to clean up areas to look presentable in a nanosecond compared with the hours you’d normally devote to cleaning. You find temporary homes for items that only moments before covered visible surfaces like counters and tabletops.

There isn’t one correct way to tidy your inbox, but one logical place to start is chronologically. Many of us are guilty of hanging onto emails from previous years. They become the computer equivalent of the kitchen junk drawer. You know it’s there, but what exactly “it” is or why you still have it remains a mystery. Start by creating folders for everything that isn’t dated 2015. Create a 2014 folder (if you’re really an email hoarder, you might need a 2013 folder as well) and move your oldest emails into that folder.

Organize. Once you have tidied your inbox enough so you can breathe again, it’s time to eliminate unwanted and unnecessary email. The trick, however, is to organize emails that you do want to keep so you can deal with them in an orderly fashion. Most email programs provide the ability to mark, flag or label emails so they sort into specific folders or categories.

You might want to sort all mail from your team members into a specific folder so you can easily locate important messages from them. For example, create a set of broad categories such as “projects” with subcategories for the specific projects you oversee.

Rule. Rule your emails. Take charge.

After you have swept your inbox and categorized the remaining emails, you’ll be tempted to start deleting. Wait. You don’t want to have to do this every day, and as your grandma used to say, “A job worth doing is worth doing right.” It’s time to establish rules so that your inbox essentially sorts itself.

You can establish “rules” for most email programs to sort your email by folder as soon as it is delivered to your inbox. If for example, your sales team copies you on the estimates they generate for clients, you might create a rule to place emails with the word “estimate” immediately into the “Estimates” folder, as you want a record but do not need to address those emails immediately.

Eliminate. Finally, the fun begins. Delete the unneeded, unwanted and unloved emails. You have no trouble pitching junk mail from the kitchen table when guests are on their way, so you should have no trouble at all with this task!

Skim the remaining contents of your inbox for emails that you don’t need to keep. When you find one from that oh-so-annoying copier salesperson, switch to a sort by sender. You might find a slew of emails from that person you can quickly delete without regret.

Taking action is the key to successful inbox management. When you open your email, scan for anything that requires immediate action or can be dealt with in two minutes or less. Save longer emails for later. If your email program allows it, sort your emails into conversations. Conversations streamline your inbox by grouping the emails, thus showing fewer emails in your view.

If your inbox is burdened by newsletters and sales promotions from people or companies that no longer interest you, unsubscribe. While you’re at it, turn off those annoying notifications from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest. You know where to find them anyway, and those notifications are an immediate distraction from the work at hand.