How to manage your inbox better & in half the time

Monday morning rolls round. You’ve managed to wrestle to kids to school, throw a cup of coffee down and now you’re at your desk/corner of the dining room table/couch (delete as appropriate). You’re stomach sinks, not because of a meeting or any content you have to create, but because you know you’re going to have to open that inbox. The inbox of doom! You’ve probably been putting it off and now you know you have to go in.

Email is an awesome way to communicate and it can also be very exciting. We’ve ALL had those emails that make our day. On the other hand, we’ve all had those days when we feel totally out of control due to the mess that is in our inbox. It has to stop, right now!

On average 1/4 of the average worker’s day is spent answering and reading emails, McKinsey Global Institute 

There are ways to stop this email stress and to change your inbox from the place of concern to a place of calm. I’m going to share them in this post. I’m also going to tell you about a couple of great tools that can help you manage your inbox too. Ready?

Manage your inbox in half the time

• Keep your inbox empty

Having an inbox full of emails can be really stressful. Knowing they’re there adds to our cognitive load, meaning they just play on our mind.  With this in mind try to keep your inbox empty. Then emails that arrive can be found easily and dealt with, rather than having to search through a big list to find things.

• Start afresh

How out of control is your inbox? Do you think it has gone past the point of salvage? Will it take hours to get it in some sort of order? If the answers to these questions are very, yes and yes, then just delete the lot!  It will make you feel better and you can then start being more organised.  You will save lots of time and stress; if anyone really wants an answer they will email you back again.

If the thought of this makes you feel a bit queasy, then how about saving the last fortnight or month of emails and deleting any older ones?

• Look at it and deal with it

It’s tempting to look at an email, then get distracted and get caught up doing something else. Leaving the email to sit there, until the next time you look at it and maybe the next time… Instead of this revisiting, open an email, review it and then action it straight away. It might take some effort to start working like this, but it will save you time and energy.

There are a couple of principles that work together here. The first being ‘touch it once’ ( which you can use around the house too!). If you pick something up deal with it straight away, don’t put it down somewhere else, just deal with it. The same goes for email. If you read it, deal with it.

The other theory is the “Two-Minute Rule” (from David Allen). When you read your mail, if the email will take less than two minutes to read and reply to, then do it straight away, even if it’s not a high priority. The theory is that if it takes less than 2 minutes to complete it, this is less time than it would take to store it in order to do it later.

If you think it will take longer than two minutes to action, schedule time on your calendar or add it to your todo list. Then tag the email so you know it is one you need to go back to.

• Tag your emails according to their priority;

• Close your inbox

• Unsubscribe more than you subscribe. 

Be selective with what you sign up for. Make sure it is really worth cluttering up your inbox for. Then every time a subscription type email comes in, ask yourself if you really need to read it?  If not, click the unsubscribe and remove your details.  If there’s not an unsubscribe option mark it as spam.

• Use a separate ‘sign up’ email address

If you wish to subscribe to a newsletter or another service that is non urgent, use another email.  This will keep these emails out of your main inbox, allowing you to focus on them when you have time.

• Schedule time to attend to your inbox

Make sure you schedule in regular time to keep on top of your emails, to prevent them getting out of hand. However, no more than two/three slots a day. Try not to look at your email first thing in the morning. This will mean you are starting the day on someone else’s agenda.

Mark ’email’ in your calendar so you a strict with this time and you don’t forget and let them build up again. You can even add an auto response which states that you will checking your emails at Xam and Xpm. So people are aware that there maybe a delay until they receive a response.

• Keep an external to-do list

Often an email will sit in our inbox as it needs us to do another task, if this is the case, create an external to do list and then archive the email.

• Concise replies.

There are going to be some emails that you want to respond to, but remember to be concise. They don’t need War and Peace, just a few short, concise sentences.

• Use Gmail labels

If you are a Gmail user, then you need to use Labels, one email can have multiple labels, but it can only be put into one folder. So labels give you more options. You can apply Labels manually to specific messages or you can use Filters to automatically apply them. Labels combined with filters allows you to pre-sort your emails and organise your inbox automatically.

• Non-urgent emails

Re-route these subscription or non-urgent email to another email address, or use rules, so that they’re instantly delivered to a particular folder. This will help keep all of a certain type of emails together ready when you have time to action/read. For example, if you get notifications from sites such as PayPal, set up a rule that makes all the @paypal.com emails go straight into a separate folder that you can look through at your leisure.

• Canned responses or Auto text

Do you say the same thing again and again? You can stop having to type the text out each time by using the “Canned Responses” option in gmail. Pre-type your responses, insert your response of choice into the email, edit if necessary and send. If you not on gmail, just google Autotext and install one, this will do the same thing for you.

• Use inbox folders

There is a fairy fundamental error with the folder system many people use in their inbox. Folders are often created based on topics when they should be based on time. For example, not Email, Community, Brands etc. But rather To do today, This week, This month, Reference etc.

This system means that you won’t miss deadline and you will keep on top of your work based on the deadline, rather than the arbitrary topic.

• Use an e-mail manager.

There are some tools which when added to your inbox they can create a more user friendly workspace. SaneBox, Dragstar, Sortd to name a few.

I use Sortd and it is amazing! Oh and free! It enables me to have different columns (labelled as I wish – Today, This Week, This Month, Reference. Then I can drag emails into the corresponding column.

Tools to help you manage your inbox

• Unroll.me

This free tool allows you to unsubscribe in bulk or roll your emails up into a daily digest. It also scans your subscriptions to find ones you might not even know about.

• FollowUpThen

Here’s fab tool that reminds you (and even the people you’re in the conversation with) to follow up on specific emails.

• IFTTT

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a cool productivity tool that links apps, programmes and devices together. There is no limit to what you can ask IFTTT to do. Specifically related to email, you can;

• Turn emails into Trello cards.
• Send email attachments automatically to Dropbox.
• Get a text message when a specific person emails you.
• Add “receipt” or “order” emails to a Google spreadsheet.
• Save starred emails to Evernote.
• Schedule reminders tomorrow for the emails you star in your inbox today.

I hope you feel fired up and ready to attack your inbox. Is there anything new here that you can implement to help you manage your inbox?

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