Here is the challenge for you. Try to think how many hours you spend on managing your email inbox. If you deal with email correspondence in work and everyday life, then probably you are getting a lot of messages thus wasting much time on managing email overload.
If you need to spend less time on organizing your inbox, you will automatically have more free time for doing other important things.
Set up the time for checking your inbox.
Just count how many times a day you check your mail. The number will probably surprise you. And usually it is not just a one-time check. We start reading emails, some of them need our replies, others need attention and so on. As a result, we spend too much time just checking the inbox folder. That is why it is necessary to define the frequency when you read your mails. For example, at the beginning of the working day, at lunch, and at the end of work. In case you are waiting for something really important, just put on the notifications on your mobile device.
Set up the time for replying to the emails.
You can reply to incoming messages a few times a day, delete unimportant messages at once, and forward those emails that need your attention to relevant folders or mark them as starred. Make this folder empty at the same time of each day. However, emails that require less than two minutes of your attention can be an exception in this rule. For example, when you need to confirm your presence somewhere, you can just reply “Thank you. I will be there.”
Sort incoming messages automatically.
For example, you have subscriptions on different topics that interest you in Google Alerts. The number of incoming messages in this case is quite solid every day. Therefore, it is recommended to create a special subfolder
“Google Alerts” in the folder “Inbox” for this correspondence, so that the notifications from search engines do not distract you from other messages. The same way you can create any additional folders in your email inbox: for the emails from your other job, learning courses, etc.
Delete the emails not important for you regularly.
If you don’t do anything to your email inbox for a few days, you will see that it will be overloaded with unimportant messages and spam. Here the constancy is the most important. Do such “cleaning” actions at the end of each day.
Unsubscribe from all newsletters you no longer need.
While it is important to organize your mailbox, it is equally important to unsubscribe from emails you no longer want to receive. You can open each message and look for an unsubscribe link that is usually placed at the end of the message and click on it. Otherwise, it is possible to use a software that will help you to automate this process. For example, Clean Email email management software will show all available subscriptions in one screen and the only thing you need is to select all newsletters you don’t need and unsubscribe from them in a few clicks.