Are you one of those people who has thousands of unopened email messages in your inbox? Do you receive emails you intend to act upon but then lose them in the pile of emails already sitting there? You are not alone. Email, whether we like it or not, is the main mode of communication used today, both for personal and business correspondence. Yet many of us have so much email, the important information tends to get lost in the junk.
Here are a few important steps to take to help you regain control of your email.
1 ) Unsubscribe from junk email. Just as you don’t want junk mail coming in and flooding your home, you really don’t want junk email coming in and clogging up your computer. Often, if you sign up for one company’s email list, you’ll end up getting on several others that you have no interest in. While it may seem a bit cumbersome to press “unsubscribe” at the bottom of the emails you no longer want to get, it is well worth it to avoid having to delete a hundred more of them later. Take 30 seconds and go to the “mail preferences” or “unsubscribe” link (often hidden at the bottom of the email) and just get off that list!
2) Delete liberally. Especially from the previously mentioned junk emails. If you want to stay on JCrew’s email list to get notices of their sales and coupons, just make sure to delete them as soon as you know you aren’t going to purchase something. Don’t worry, they will keep sending them to you if you decide you want to buy something later on.
3) Sign up for an email filtering program like Sanebox.com. Sanebox automatically filters your junk and unimportant emails to a separate “sanebox” inbox which holds them there until you are ready view them. This allows emails from people that you deem important to move to the top of your inbox and not get lost in the morass of junk email.
4) When you do read an email, try to assign an action to it as soon as possible. Several email programs give you the ability to flag or star important emails that you need to get back to if you can’t act upon them immediately. You can even create a To Do email folder and move emails that require action into it. Then be sure to delete them once you have completed the action. If you want to hang on to an email for archival or reference purposes, move it into a folder labeled with the topic it covers.
While it might not be possible to get all the way down to zero messages, doing any of the steps described above will make your inbox a lot a more manageable.
What tips do you have for controlling your email?
2 thoughts on “Stop drowning in your email”
Those are great tips. I have a separate gmail account that I use only for retailers. If I’m heading to a particular store, I can check that email account to see if there are recent coupons.