7 Easy Steps to A Clean Email Inbox
Let’s talk about your email inbox. Sure, it’s virtual, but that doesn’t mean it should be messy. If you use your email as means to communicate about things that matter to you—whether that’s client requests on a work account or birthday party evites on a personal account—then you should care about keeping a clean email inbox. Because if you want to read the emails that matter, you have to filter through the emails that don’t.
Much like any space of your house, a clean email inbox requires regular care and attention. But once you start, it’s pretty easy to maintain good email hygiene. The habits do not take long.
Whether you’re an “inbox zero” person to begin with or you’re starting with thousands upon thousands of emails to sort through, I believe you can achieve a clean email inbox with these 7 simple steps.
How To Get A Clean Email Inbox
1. Be Strategic About Your Email Addresses
You can have multiple email addresses. In fact, I recommend it.
I personally like to have 3 email accounts: work, primary personal, and throw-away. This helps me organize right from the start. I do not like to mix work and personal communications because they have virtually no overlap. That an easy line for me draw. And the “throw-away” account is very useful because I never even worry about cleaning that one out.
By using different accounts to support different categories, you will set yourself up for success. I could also see value in breaking down some categories even further. For example: you could have separate emails for purchases versus kids/family. But keep in mind that the more email accounts you have, the more places you have to check, so don’t overdo it.
If you create a new email address account, be sure to choose a good email service provider. I personally prefer Gmail, because it has a lot of features that help automatically clear the clutter in your inbox. But do some research and decide what is most important to you.
2. Understand The Power of “Archive”
Email archiving is beautiful thing. Archiving an email removes the email from your inbox while still preserving it and making it searchable. This means that the email appears to be deleted, but it is available if you ever need to reference it again.
Given that 90% of the emails I receive are informational but do not require action, this is key. Archiving is my equivalent of “delete,” and because I know that I can access the information at any point, I can do it to most of my emails as soon as I read them.
3. Don’t Over-Do The Folders
Email folders are essentially files. Instead of just archiving to one big place, you can create folders and file emails away in those folders based on categories. This can be a helpful tool, but it is also more work.
I believe email folders are best for structured, high-volume email accounts with distinct categories and communications that need to be referenced often. To put it more plainly, I use folders for my work email but not for my personal email.
It’s important to remember that emails are searchable. Unlike physical items in your house, you can find an email by just typing in a few keywords. It doesn’t necessarily need to be sorted into categories to find it. Sorting emails as you receive them adds time and effort that needs to be worth the work you put into it.
For my personal account, there’s just no need for folders. But for my work account, I do prefer to search within folders due to the high volume of communications with the same people on different topics. But even there, I try to keep the folder categories at a high level so that I can file away emails quickly and minimize the work it takes to clear out my inbox.
The key takeaway? Keep your folder structure simple and your email inbox will be easier to clean!
4. Clear Past a Cut-Off Date
If you haven’t attended to your emails in a long time, consider clearing out everything prior to a given date. What is the absolute farthest back you might actually care about an email? Probably 1, maybe 2 months. It depends on your situation, but you almost definitely don’t need your emails from over a year ago. Pick a date, and automatically archive everything before that date. Then whatever remains is what you can go through and handle in more detail.
5. Unsubscribe
Please, please, please unsubscribe. You are probably receiving emails that you shouldn’t be. Unless the email account is a “throw-away” account, you should prioritize the emails for which you actually need to be informed or take action. Here are some email types for which you should consider unsubscribing:
- Brands from which you’ve purchased a product
- Newsletters that you don’t actually have time to read
- Notifications that aren’t necessary or would be better in a different format
Be ruthless. Do you really need to know every time that your favorite brand has a sale? Or would it be better to just actively seek out the brand when you need something from them? Don’t sign up to be tempted to buy things you don’t need.
6. Identify & Defer Follow-Ups
If you actually want to get to inbox zero, this is what you need to do. There are some types of emails that require follow-ups. You can’t necessarily take action on them right now, but you know you need to at some point…
My favorite tool for this situation is the “Snooze” button in Gmail. If I can’t respond to or archive the email immediately, I think about what the blockers are for doing so, and then I snooze the email until a later time when those blockers will be resolved or I have what I need to make the decision. For my work email which uses Outlook, I do the same thing by “flagging” emails and setting them for follow-up on a given date.
7. Use Time Batching To Read Your Emails
So you’ve reached inbox zero—congratulations! But what about tomorrow? The thing with emails is that they never stop. You can’t just clean them out once. You need to have a system that allows you to keep up with them on a regular basis.
To prevent burnout and maximize efficiency, I recommend time batching. You don’t need to address your emails every minute of every day (unless that’s part of your job description). Emails are by nature a non-urgent form of communication. But they also shouldn’t be left for too long, or you might miss something important that could become urgent.
I recommend going through your emails in batches once every day or few days, depending on the nature of your account. For my work emails, I go through them a couple times per day, but I still try to do so in batches by setting aside “email time”.
So let’s get started clearing out that email inbox. It probably won’t even take as long as you think it will! If your motivation is low, set a timer, and just commit to working towards a cleaner inbox for that set amount of time. It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time around. You can do it!
