Email is suppose to be tool to make your life easier not harder. Somehow that just doesn’t seem to be the case.
Someone ask you, “Did you get my email?” You say, “What email? My Inbox is such a disaster I don’t know if I got it or not.”
If this happened to you the problem is Inbox clutter. You have messages you will never read and you don’t care to read. Or maybe you do want to read them but you’ll never have the time. So delete them!
If you have messages in your Inbox for a week and you haven’t read th delete them. That’s right delete them. These messages are not a help, they’re a burden.
Here’s some tips to relieve the burden…
- Get off of mailing list! Especially those you are not reading.
- If you have subscribed to them, unsubscribe.
- Don’t sign up for new list. If you accidentally get on a new list immediately unsubscribe.
- Any organization worth anything will have the information on their website.
- If you never subscribed to a particular list and yet your still receiving mail these maybe spam. Don’t unsubscribe to these! Just setup a filter to delete them.
- Email is not a possession! Don’t hang on to it!
- Use Gmail or Yahoo Mail! It is not on your computer locally and they have great spam filtering!
- If you use POP mail send your mail through a spam and virus filtering service like MailRoute. Say your a TWIT listener and get 10% off your order for the life of your account.
- Use folders, labels, filters and rules.
- If spam, I immediately apply filter. It’s easy with Yahoo or Gmail you check the message and click the Spam button.
- I read the message if there is nothing in that message I need for later I immediately delete it.
- If it is a receipt or something I might need for much later, I archive it.
- If I need the information for the near future I leave it in my Inbox.
I usually keep 15 to 40 messages in my inbox. When it grows to large I reevaluate them and archive or delete what I don’t need in the near future.
If it’s something I need to keep I may archive them for later use. The Inbox is only for things that need attention in the next week.
If you have a really big problem delete almost everything and start over!
Bonus Tip – If you are a Gmail user and you have a full Inbox, select all of your messages except the ones you need this week and click “Archive”. Like magic you have a clean Inbox. Wait your Email is not deleted it’s in “All Mail” and can be accessed though “Search Mail” or clicking “more, All Mail”.
If you are a POP mail user you can do the same thing. Make a folder. Call it archive or old-stuff or anything you like. Select all but the must recent emails and move them all to that folder leaving only the new mail in your inbox.
See the messages you want to receive and never again be bothered by clutter!
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