Declutter your Inbox!

Moving into a central district role this year, layered with remote learning/working, the number of emails that I receive has grown! I've been spending some dedicated time over the past week to replying, deleting and archiving emails both in my work account and personal accounts. Along the way, I discovered some tips and strategies to keep those emails in check. I am not sure if anyone else feels a little bit of anxiety when they see thousands of emails sitting in their inbox. My work/life goal is inbox zero, where my inbox has zero emails in it or as close it to it as possible. My district uses Gmail as our mail program, so please keep that in mind with the three tips/strategies to help you declutter your email inbox!

1. Out with the Old Emails & Filer the New Ones!

What do you do with all those emails that are sitting in your inbox? The thought of clicking delete one by one or sorting through them all is scary! In one of my accounts, I had emails sitting there from 2013!  Gmail gives you some quick ways to filter emails to label and archive them, or delete them. Best of all, you can apply these filters to past conversations!

Find an email that you would like to filter. My tip is to start with some junk mail or commercial email that has the same sender email address. Select that email and then click on the three dots to select the 'Filter messages like these' option.

This will create the filter based on a specific parameter. Edit any of the criteria so that Gmail can filter any future messages the same way. For that commercial email, you can have any message with the same sender address marked read and send into a specific folder. For that junk email, you can have anything with the subject line 'You have just won" automatically deleted bypassing your inbox. Click on 'create filter' to go on to the next step.

The last step in setting up a filter is to pick what actions you want for the emails. Click on any combinations of checkboxes that make sense based on the email that is being filtered. If archiving emails (Skip the inbox), apply a label to it to make it easier to find at a later date. Don't forget to check the last checkbox titled "Also apply filter..." as this will perform the same actions to all past emails! 

By following those steps and repeating for different groups of emails...POOF!.... old emails in your inbox will disappear! 

2. Make Checking Emails a Dedicated Task, not an In-between Task

You can't stop the emails from coming into your inbox, but you can control when you check your email and if you are distracted with a notification. Filters will help sort out some of the incoming mail, but there will be emails that still need your attention. When you have email notification turned on, you will get distracted each time an email arrives, disrupting your thought process. Notifications can be turned off in the Gmail settings and you may want to consider turning off notification on your mobile device. Although many emails can be quickly responded to, some emails require time to think and reflect before replying and should have dedicated time for this task.  

I've started to dedicated time to respond to emails where I am not switching between tasks or dropping what I am doing to check email. If a quick response is truly needed, colleagues can get a more immediate response from giving me a call.  This dedicated time allow me to give my full attention to this task and I have found that I am able to quickly get through emails. Accordingly, when it comes time to committing my attention to other tasks, I am able to completely focus on the task at hand. 

3. Respond Right Away with an Email Action

With dedicated time for email, to help keep your inbox clutter free and achieve that inbox with zero emails, you need to respond to the emails right away. This doesn't mean replying to each email, but responding to each email allows you to triage what needs your immediate attention. In Gmail, there are  options that are very helpful in addition to reply, delete and archive. 

Snooze - Allows you to temporary remove an email from your inbox to return at a specified date. When there is an email where I will require a longer time to reply to or I can't reply to it yet,  I will often snooze the email until I have the time or all the information respectively. 

Schedule send - Allow you to automatically send an email at a specific time. Sometime there isn't enough hours in the day with family members learning/working from home especially during this pandemic. There have been times where I have some dedicated time to respond to emails outside the working hours. After composing my response, I do not send the email in that moment to get it out of my inbox, instead I use schedule send to send it out first thing the next work day. I do not want to send a colleague a work email notification outside work hours as it's disruptive to their work/life balance but I also want to protect my work/life balance. If a colleague receive a response outside of the working hours, they will assume that you are reachable during that time. This creates a cycle that blurs work/life boundaries. By schedule sending emails, despite whenever they are composed they will only be received during working hours. 

What strategies do you use to declutter your email inbox and keep it organized? Please share in the comments! Don't forget to subscribe to get email updates and check out my social media channels for more tips/strategies from my technological life!