A cluttered email inbox can make your life chaotic in more ways than you can imagine. It can make you overlook important mails that are prone to get lost between thousands of unimportant newsletters and spammy messages. And if you are a busy bee who doesn’t get time to deal with emails as they arrive, decluttering your email inbox should be on top of your priorities right now.
My email inbox had a little over 1 lakh unread messages until last month and it took me an entire day to declutter it. It wasn’t something that I was unaware of. I knew that it was full to the gills but didn’t care because of my unwillingness to go through the time-consuming task of fixing it. It was being spammed daily with newsletters that I knew I would never care to open and promotional emails from shopping websites that I barely shop from.
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I had never thought about decluttering my email inbox until I found myself gripped with utmost frustration trying to look for relevant and important messages amid a pile of junk emails. You can imagine the magnitude of the problem with the fact that I have more than 6 email accounts to manage all of which are super active.
I lately realized that email clutter is a problem that almost each one of us is struggling with. And we’ve become so used to it that spending even a few minutes dealing with it seems worthless because it would go back to being cluttered in no time.
But let me tell you that digital declutter is as important as decluttering your home because our digital devices are practically running our lives in today’s day and age.
If you’re looking for some tips & tricks for decluttering your digital mailbox, here are a few that can help:
1. Have separate accounts for Work and Personal Mails
You are more likely to miss the important emails if all your work-related and personal emails go into a single email account. Make sure you separate your work and personal email accounts if you haven’t already. You might have to spend a little time decluttering your emails now but having separate accounts for work and personal emails will leave you with less to sort through in future.
2. Check your emails twice a day
The best way to prevent email clutter is to deal with your emails as they arrive. Set aside 10 minutes twice a day from your busy schedule to check your emails – in the morning and then in the evening. Be sure to stick to the 10-minute timer or you will end up wasting all your time reading the mails. Use some of this time to delete old emails and move the important ones to a separate folder.
3. Unsubscribe
Did you know that marketing and promotional emails cause the maximum amount of clutter in your email inbox?
Sometimes, we subscribe for offers and services on impulse but don’t realize what they do to our inboxes. Even if you never bother to open a marketing newsletter, you’re unintentionally allowing it to control your digital life.
So if you’ve been getting too many spammy newsletters in your email inbox, sort through them right away. Press unsubscribe on the newsletters you barely open and keep only the ones that interest you.
4. Delete unwanted emails
In order to declutter your inbox and make it more simplified, delete all unwanted and irrelevant emails once and for all. This is the most time-consuming part of decluttering emails because you have to carefully look through them before pressing the Delete button. You don’t want to get rid of any important personal or work-related email.
Start from the top and mass select 50 or 100 messages that you want to delete. Then press the Delete button and repeat the process again. Deleting lakhs of emails at once is almost impossible which is why you can do it in your downtime. I used to declutter my inbox while travelling to work or while watching TV. Now I deal with them as and when they arrive.
5. Have a single Inbox for all your accounts
While it’s wise to separate your work and personal email accounts, you can still choose to have just one inbox for all of them. This will help you eliminate the need for going through separate inboxes every time you wish to check your emails. I use Microsoft Outlook to keep my emails organized and absolutely love it.
6. Do a weekly digital spring cleaning
Given how fast an email inbox fills up, even an entire day won’t be enough to declutter the mails that have been piling up for months. Reserve a few minutes every week for a quick digital spring cleaning. You can delete a few hundred emails every week or even more if the time allows, but make sure that you make it a regular habit.
7. Organize your mails using folders
If you’ve been receiving work-related mails from a few senders, you can create folders to keep them all organized in one place. Similarly, create a separate folder for any important mails that you get from family and friends.
Over the years, I have created a few folders to keep my emails organized – one for bills & receipts, one for mails from friends and family, one for the mails from my stock broker and another for all work-related emails.
8. Turn off email notifications from social media apps
Given that you’re always on top of your social media game, you don’t need Facebook, instagram and twitter to email you every time someone follows you or sends you a message. You can simply turn off the notifications and this alone will cut your email clutter by half going forward.
Now that you know about the ways and strategies of decluttering your email inbox, it’s finally time to give it a go. Decluttering, as an exercise, should apply to all areas of your life – physical and digital. Just as you feel the need to organize your homes to make it more liveable, start recognizing digital decluttering as a regular practice in your decluttering routine in order to eliminate the stress that comes with having a cluttered digital device.