Declutter Your Inbox

Decluttering is a hot topic currently. One of the hardest things to declutter is your email. That’s why I was so pleased to come across this helpful article: 13 Email Management Best Practices To Declutter Your Inbox

Email management also goes hand in hand with time management, because email is such a time hog.

These are the 13 tips from the post to give you a quick overview. Read the full details by linking to the article. I have added my comment to each tip.

1] Allocate a specific time for email every day
- This creates a system and frees up time
2] Hit that “delete” button
- How many emails are still stuck in your inbox that you meant to get to sometime?
- Remove as much as you can and archive the rest.
3] Labels, folders, and categories to the rescue
- I have been doing this for years and it is very helpful.
4] Unsubscribe or “mass unsubscribe”
- They say that Unroll.me works great, but for me I just might get overenthusiastic and remove something that I will later regret and then when I go looking for it I can’t remember the site or name.
5] Set up filters to send emails where they belong
1. Filters are another important part of a system. Automate as much as possible.
6] Multiple inboxes to the rescue
- What a great idea. These are the instructions on how to do it in Gmail.

Click on the top right corner of your primary Gmail inbox.
Select “Settings” under the dropdown.
Click on “Labs” in navigation and search for “multiple inbox” in the search bar. Make sure you save changes.
Once you are done, go back to “settings” and you will be able to see a new tab on the extreme right called “Multiple Inboxes.” Click on it and fill up the details.

7] Convert your group email accounts into shared inboxes
- I don’t have any experience with this.
8] Apply the 80/20 Rule
- Shift your focus needs to the 20% of the emails you are getting the highest value from.
9] Pause your inbox
- Boomerang is an easy tool that acts as a personal secretary and reminds you if you don’t hear back from someone.
10] Touch it once
- This frees up time and makes you more productive.
11] Flag emails that need ‘more’ attention
- Flagging emails in Outlook is quite straight forward, but not so in Gmail.
- Check out this YouTube video to see how you can use Tasks in Gmail to flag your emails.
12] Disable social media email notifications
- You can do this quite easily by logging in to your accounts and deactivate all email notifications.
13] Set up default replies
- If you don’t know how to do this, check out this easy HubSpot tutorial