Clutter Free Inbox In 4 Simple Steps

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Emails are life saving these days and one cannot imagine a world without them. However, a cluttered inbox can kill you instead of giving life. You could easily spend years looking for important emails lost in the sea of others. Further, a cluttered inbox is highly demotivating and I hate to look one in the morning. A clean inbox is bright and motivating; it makes our lives easy and above all, it serves the purpose.

Here are 4 simple ways to make your email box clutter free.

Subscribe only to blog/websites’ newsletters if you are truly interested in what they are offering. Even if you read one or more interesting articles in the site, a subscription may not be necessary.

Think twice before submitting your email address. Your inbox will definitely become cluttered because of the multiple newsletters, update and promotional offer emails.

However, everyone will find interest in a bunch of websites and services and would like to subscribe to them. If so, keep a separate email address for your subscriptions alone.

Doing so will keep your main work and personal email box clutter free and less crowded. Secondly, even if your email address is traded for, you won’t be much annoyed by the spammy emails coming through.

Set up a defense perimeter for your main emails while subscribing. Go back and check once in a fortnight to see if you are still interested in all of your subscriptions.

Checking once in a while will help eliminating stuff you were once interested in, but not interested in any more. And, you can also remind yourself of any subscriptions you are still interested in.

This is a story that is different from subscriptions. When you meet people online and face to face, you exchange contact addresses and stuff. Set yourself some rules about this. Giving out emails to anyone is like standing there out naked. You are exposed and you will see a flood in the incoming traffic (not the kind of traffic which you will be always interested at).

Share your email only with persons you trust, to your close friends and to people with whom you have some business. For all other flirting, dating, fun stuff and etcs. you can use your online social profiles like that of Twitter, Facebook, Digg, whatever. That is what they are for.

But email is something different. It is neither public not private, the boundary is thin. Find it and use it appropriately.

Most importantly, be cautious about putting up your email address on your social profiles (especially Facebook). Again, you will be out there naked.

Labeling emails is the one go technique to filter your email. Don’t leave your emails to get lost in the sea of other things. Rather file them with appropriate labels as you would file your papers in a paper folder.

Labeling aka putting in folders has one major benefit- You can easily fetch the email you want by looking into the right folder (or the label). So even if your inbox is cluttered, you won’t be affected by it.

Filters come to your rescue when you are being attacked by spams, and yes if you are having an email address you will for sure be attacked by spams. Filters are there, so help yourself.

(i) Blacklist email addresses the very first time you receive a spam message (it will be harder later, believe me).

(ii) Set filters for words that usually come with spams (I would write a few example words but I hate to write them (yulk!))

(iii) Don’t be too strict in setting up filters, you may lose genuine emails.

(iv) Don’t feel lazy about updating your filters with more words and rules everyday. It may take a couple of minutes, but will save you hours in the end.

When it comes to managing either time or emails, one of the most important things to remember is that there is a thing called prioritizing. As you would prioritize your tasks according to their importance and urgency, you should also be willing to prioritize your emails and take action accordingly. The four quadrants of time management applies to emails too. Identify the quadrant in which each of your emails falls into.

(i) Urgent and important emails - take immediate action so that if you don’t, the sky will fall on your head.

(ii) Urgent but not important - Do not take any action on these emails except deleting them, unless you want to try something out crazy. Urgent emails just grab your attention but do nothing good. But some emails of this kind may bring in some fun, in which case you can act immediately (but your productivity is at risk for sure).

(iii) Important but not urgent - Mark these emails with appropriate flags and take action at a later time, for sure.

(iv) Not urgent and not important - Delete

Emails came to practice because we wanted to have our lives a lot simplified. One cannot imagine carrying hand written letters between countries for urgent tasks that need communications in a time frame of few minutes or seconds. And, it is sweet to see that an email almost instantly reaches the destination. However, instead of using it as a tool, we should not make it a PITA.

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Article by JaneSheeba

+Jane is the founder of Problogging Success. She is an expert blogger, consultant, freelance writer and blog designer. Don't forget to get your hands on two FREE Ebooks she offers.

Jane has written 244 awesome posts for Problogging Success.