How to declutter your inbox
Not only do I want to declutter my home, but other areas of my life are cluttered too. One example of this is my inbox. At the moment, my personal email address has over 4000 unread emails, mostly junk mail. In addition, that inbox has folder and sub-folders containing more unread emails. There should be rules that move emails into these folders, but some don’t appear to work.
Here’s how I’m going to tackle this:
- Assess what emails that I get that I actually need. These include orders, payments made etc.
- Assess which emails are useful. For example, some email subscriptions contain challenges that I’ve joined, and so are useful to refer back to.
- Assess what emails that I need to keep. Where the email relates to business, payments made or anything legal, then these emails need to be kept. By definition, a backup copy needs to be made of these items.
- Delete the rest.
- Prevent my inbox becoming cluttered again. I’ll do this by unsubscribing from unread email lists, checking what emails come in each day and deleting those that are irrelevant.
Unsubscribing from email lists.
I get so many emails from people and organisations that I joined, but the sheer volume of them means I don’t get to read them. I had set up many of these with rules that moved them to a relevant folder, so I just have to unsubscribe from the list, delete those in the folder, then delete the folder. This will have the benefit of preventing more emails in the future.
Building daily email habits
To maintain a clear inbox, then it’s essential to deal with emails as they come in. Read each one and either action it, or delete it. Doing this once a day should be sufficient, although, when I came back from holiday, I found that I’d received over 400 emails in just 7 days!
It’s going to take me a while to clear my inbox, so for the next two weeks, I’ll be clearing emails from the previous week, to allow me to catch up on things.
If this is something that you need to do, why not comment below and tell me how you’re getting on?
Take care for now, and remember: you ARE resourceful, creative and whole.
Karen