BETTER MANAGE YOUR EMAIL INBOX WITH THESE 4 SIMPLE STEPS
With times changing, email is becoming more and more popular. While it can seem very quick and easy to send an email, being on the receiving end of countless emails, can leave many of us feeling frazzled and struggling to keep up.
Managing your emails well is key to you feeling more organised and less chaotic meaning you can focus your mental energy on more important tasks.
Keep reading, if you don’t want to be a slave to your inbox anymore and to learn how to better manage your emails.
1. Check your Emails Regularly
Checking your emails regularly will reduce the risk that they will build up on you and help you to stay on top of things.
This doesn’t mean that you need to be checking your emails every hour or need to turn push notifications on. Rather, plan to check your emails at scheduled intervals throughout your day.
There’s nothing worse than when you haven’t checked your emails for a few days and then have to spend hours sorting through them and before you know it, your day is half over. Checking your emails regularly will enable you to be more productive.
2. Use a Flagging System
With so many emails coming in each and everyday, it can be so easy for the important emails to get lost amongst the myriad of non-important emails. This is why having a flagging system is key to staying on top of things.
Two options for different flagging systems could include:
· Marking emails as unread until you have actioned them. Once you have read the email, marking it as unread asks as a constant reminder that it needs to be actioned.
· Using the flagging feature to mark emails as important. This way it is much easier to filter to view all of your flagged emails when you need to find a specific email.
It really doesn’t matter which flagging system you use to manage your emails, as long as it works for you and is a clear way for you to separate the important emails from all of the others.
3. Use an Archiving System
Emails are a form of record keeping and deleting emails is therefore not a good practice to get into.
You never know when you might need to refer back to an email at a later time, and with the capability for mailboxes these days to sync with hard disks or cloud-based storage systems, you no longer ever really need to delete emails as you will never run out of storage.
Most mailboxes have the ability for you to set up an archiving folder. Once you have read an email, file it away in an archived folder, just like you would file away papers on your desk.
You could also set up auto-archiving so your emails are automatically moved to an archived folder after a specified period of time (e.g. 3 months).
Whether you archive manually or automatically, having an archiving system can reduce the number of emails that you visually see in your inbox and help you to feel more on top of things.
4. Unsubscribe from Irrelevant Mailing Lists
Unsubscribe from any emails that are no longer valuable to you. You may have signed up to mailing lists to enter a competition, or receive the freebie content that was being offered, but if the emails you continue to receive from the company are no longer of value to you, you should unsubscribe.
It’s a requirement of law for companies to make it easy for consumers to unsubscribe from electronic mailing lists and most emails will therefore have a link at the bottom of the email for you to click to automatically unsubscribe.
So, next time you receive an email from a company that is no longer relevant to you, unsubscribe. You will very quickly notice a big reduction in the number of new emails coming in to your inbox.
Let’s all help each other along the road to a more manageable inbox!
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About the Author
Nadia is the founder of On Her Desk, an online luxury stationery brand for driven and ambitious women. Nadia created On Her Desk to support women to be organised without compromising on style.
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