3 Easy Steps to Help You Better Manage Your Email Inbox
By: Eric Sangerma
Tags: Email Productivity, Inbox Zero, Productivity, Time Management, Getting Things Done

Some emails are life-changing. Your inbox might hold a letter from a friend you lost touch with, a networking opportunity you wouldn’t want to miss, or the job offer of your dreams. That’s enough reason to stay on top of your inbox at all times — if you’re not managing your emails well, something crucial could pass you by.

More generally, keeping up with our emails is a professional and social obligation nearly every adult shares. Responding to professional emails in a timely way is an integral part of the workday. We have more leeway when it comes to our personal inboxes, but sporadic or late responses can damage important social ties.

As they keep piling up, the emails we receive start looking impossible to defeat. If you tend to struggle with emails, or you have a daunting backlog for whatever reason, you need a strategy for clearing out your inbox and then keeping it clear.

Improve Your Email Organization in Three Steps

You keep getting emails and it seems like you’ll never get rid of them. There are many different approaches to this problem, and here is a simple one.

Step One — Empty Your Inbox

For each message in your inbox, perform one of the following actions:

1. Delete or archive the email.

If the message is unimportant, simply delete it. You can also take this opportunity to block the sender, if you know for sure that you don’t want to keep receiving messages from them. Bulk deleting by sender can decrease your backlog dramatically.

In the case of work emails, it might be better to archive unimportant messages instead of deleting them.

2. Answer it.

We recommend the Getting Things Done two-minute rule here: if you can reply to an email in less than two minutes, do so immediately. Or, if you’re not the person best qualified to reply, forward the email right away.

Doing this whenever you check your inbox will give you a sense of accomplishment, it will drastically improve your response rate, and it’s especially useful to those who are prone to overthinking their correspondence.

Once you’ve responded to an email, you can delete it, archive it, or more to the next step — file it away.

3. File it away.

Whether you’re using Gmail or email software like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird, you have the option to move your email from your inbox to a folder. We suggest the following three folders as the pillars of your email organization.

To-Do — if an email needs a response, and that response will take you more than two minutes, move the email from the inbox to this folder, and then leave it for the time being.

— if an email needs a response, and that response will take you more than two minutes, move the email from the inbox to this folder, and then leave it for the time being. References — this folder is for emails you need to keep but don’t need to respond to (either because your input is not required or because you’ve already replied to them). The emails in this folder should all contain information that will be useful to you in the near future.

— this folder is for emails you need to keep but don’t need to respond to (either because your input is not required or because you’ve already replied to them). The emails in this folder should all contain information that will be useful to you in the near future. Support — this is where you put emails you can only answer after you’ve received information from a third party or, you’re waiting for somebody else to answer them and want to make sure to follow-up.

If you’ve been neglecting your emails for a long time, this process might take a while. But emptying your inbox will feel like a victory, and checking your emails will feel less draining. Plus, reaching Inbox (0) is the best motivation to stay on top of email management in the future.

But of course, emptying your inbox isn’t enough — there are still emails you have to take care of.

Step Two — Take Care of Your To-Dos

After you’ve set up a system of organization, and your inbox is actually empty, it’s time to go through your To-Do folder. Archive or delete conversations you’re done with. (Note that if someone responds to an archived conversation, their email will end up in your inbox like usual, so there’s nothing to worry about.)

If an email is too complex to answer in one sitting, or if you need to look up additional information, add it to your task management app. Another option is to mark it as unread –this way, you can revisit it the next time you go through your To-Do folder.

It’s also important to remember that you could be able to delegate parts of the response to your coworkers. It might be necessary to move some emails to your Support folder.

Step Three — Go Over References and Support

Check the References folder next and if necessary, add new items to your task manager or calendar. Consider using tags (labels) as well — while it’s easy to search your inbox for specific keywords, tagging emails makes it easier to use them as a reference.

Finally, go through the Support folder and see if you now have received the help you need to reply to the emails that are stored there. If you have received all the necessary information, you can answer the email and then delete it, archive it, or move it to References. Waiting for someone else’s input can be especially annoying and distracting, but keeping this folder neat will help a great deal.