Conquer Your Inbox: Three Problems, Three Solutions

Are emails quicker than snail mail? Absolutely. Do they cause almost as much stress as snail mail used to? Absolutely. 

It starts with a couple of unread emails from your coworkers on a project that isn’t due until next week anyway, a few promotional emails from your favorite stores, a few emails from family that you’ll “get to later,” and before you know it, your unread email count is into three or four digits.

A virtual assistant in a group I'm in had a client with over 70,000 unread emails!

As a busy professional, all of this probably sounds familiar. But here’s the problem: your overflowing inbox isn’t just a minor inconvenience or a number your kids can tease you about—it’s actively sabotaging your productivity. 

Three Reasons Email Disorganization is Destroying Your Productivity:

1. It’s a Stress Factory: Gloria Mark, a professor at University of California, Irvine, noted that the average office worker checks their email more than 70 times a day. That number is staggering on the surface, but when you think about it, how many times do we swing past our emails for even personal things throughout the day? It is consciously and subconsciously demoralizing to open our inbox multiple times a day and see a digital mess that we can’t control.

2. It Creates Decision Fatigue: Every time you look at an email, even if you don’t open it and just look at the subject line, you are going through a tiny decision-making process in your head. Without realizing it, you say to yourself, “I can ignore this a little longer” or “is this spam?” Your brain is not a fan of all that, and you’re wearing down your brain’s ability to make higher level choices and decisions later on.

3. Missing Important Information: This is probably the most obvious one, right? Buried in among those emails is a deadline you’ve forgotten about, a request you haven’t seen yet, or a networking opportunity you could’ve used. No one wants to anger a client or a boss by missing critical information that’s hiding underneath layers of evites and announcements for upcoming sales.

So then how do you handle the inbox disaster? I’ve got you covered with three tips to simplify and streamline..

Three Ways to Organize Your Inbox into Submission:

1. Folders, Filters, and Labels: Folders are collections of similar emails sorted by parameters that you decide upon. Filters are a way to manage where incoming emails go. Labels are like tags that categorize emails, but don’t necessarily put them someplace like a folder. These are your friends, and there’s many ways you can use them depending on your preferences and work style. Want folders for each client, coworker, or project? You can do that. Prefer folders by importance level such as “action required,” “waiting on,” and so forth? You can do that too. Filters are great because they can sort emails before you ever see them. Maybe you want emails from your highest profile client to go straight into your “action required” folder so you know exactly what to look at first thing in the morning. Gmail’s labels are wonderful as they can be color-coded, and an email can have more than one label. This is a completely customizable way to streamline the inbox process; force your email to make the little decisions for you, before you even see the subject line.

2. The One Touch Rule: Not something that would trigger a work lawsuit, the one touch rule refers to handling an email as soon as you open it. No more of that “I’ll deal with it later” which got you in trouble to begin with. Reply if it will take you two minutes or less to do so. If it should be handled but will take longer, add it to your task list—perhaps with a label—and then use folders to get it out of your inbox. Delete it if it’s not important. This method keeps your inbox clean and your priorities straight. In fact, limit the amount of times a day you even touch your email, as I was quoted as recommending in this Reworked article.

3. Declare Email Bankruptcy: Yes, it's a real thing. If you find yourself completely in over your head, archive everything and let a professional get to it. If you can turn your out-of-office on for a couple days, even better. Remember what I said earlier about the client with 70,000+ emails? Yup, they got a virtual assistant posthaste to help them. You cannot handle the higher level tasks of your business if you’re drowning in emails, and everyone needs help from time to time.

Final thoughts: Keeping an organized inbox might be boring in the beginning, but it’s one of the easier ways to keep your stress low and your productivity and sanity high. You might even find enough free time to read one of my newsletters that you’ve been hoarding…