Hi and welcome to LeisureReadz! Today's read focusses on one of the common problems that we all face, i.e. a cluttered email inbox! How do we deal with it?? So, this post will act as a guide to help achieve the cleanest and the most optimized inbox possible for anyone! :)
With the snowball effect of internet on our lives these days, it’s quite easy to end up with a cluttered digital environment.
Like most of the people, I also feel enthusiastic in maintaining a clean inbox but then slowly as the initial enthusiasm fades, it is almost automatic that I become so ignorant of the incoming emails that I even don’t give them a small glance, let alone read them. Later these emails start to pile up and up to a certain point, you feel bad about it and make plans to find time to reduce this clutter. But no use! Emails continue to pile up and the e-pile clutter gets disregarded easily. After a certain time, 10k + emails mean just a number to us and we don’t even bother giving it a second thought! Fun part comes when one has to track an important email to respond to urgently and it is absolutely difficult to find it in this electronic mess. Thank god for search option, but then again we can’t remember the name or there are just too many emails showing up in the search results.
So, what do we do now??? Plus, don’t forget, it’s quite possible to miss an important email in the string of emails flooding the inbox daily. Yup, I too get stressed out when I login and see 10k+emails sitting in one of my email inboxes. Don’t know whether they are mocking at me saying that I am a disorganized email user! No, can’t let that happen!! Need to tackle this asap!!! I have been procrastinating this since long but I guess writing a blog post came to my rescue! Since ‘how to’ posts are really famous these days, I thought ‘why I can’t I write something like this?’ Well, I get my post and as a bonus a clean and organized inbox! Totally a rocking deal up for grabs! I ain’t giving up this opportunity!!! So, in today’s post I am sharing my tussle with my email inboxes (yes, I have a couple of accounts like anyone else on the planet! ;) ) and my experience in a journey towards achieving an email Zen.
Let us first look at, why does an inbox get cluttered? Well, it’s easy to sign up for something new online and with free subscriptions floating around, it’s not rocket science that one will end up with an overloaded inbox. Secondly, not clearing up junk emails upon their arrival and not setting proper sorting system for these. Thus, the number of emails keeps increasing every instant.
Therefore, I am enlisting the steps that could lead you a very much cleaner inbox which is well organized and strategies to keep it the same way every time you open it. These are based on what I did to clear out one of my inboxes. There are two phases – 1. Getting rid of clutter emails and 2. Organizing the emails
Step 1: Unsubscribe from unwanted emails – The first thing I did was to take a little time to find out the junk emails entering my inbox and unsubscribed from each of them carefully. Junk emails could be an email with a piece of information which is irrelevant to you, which no longer interests and holds a value or just plain advertising emails (There’s a lot of these which appear daily). This would ensure that I won’t be getting any spam emails hence forth, at least for some good amount of time in future. I realize that this needs to be done periodically as one can be automatically subscribed to another subscription while signing up somewhere later.
Step 2: Moving all the recently unsubscribed emails to junk/spam/any specific folder created for filtering the junk emails. As you will notice, after this step, the number of unread email count drastically changes!! And you are another step closer to achieving the so called “Email Zen”.
Step 3: Optional step: Sorting the emails by sender and then glancing through the list to see if we missed out anything that needs to be deleted. Quickly move those emails to the Trash folder. Congratulations! Phase one completed! Your inbox is now free from clutter! Half Zen achieved!!!
You might be thinking why not full Zen, now that I have gotten rid of the clutter emails but then folks, you need to have a system which will safeguard you from accumulating this clutter ever again in future.
Step 4: Here comes the second part in achieving email Zen! Now we get to the organizing phase. We need to create additional folders to sort the remaining emails. You are probably the best judge of what categories you want to create for organizing your emails. I created categories like 'Important', 'Purchases', Work', 'Info' etc.
Step 5: Moving the respective files to the newly created folders.
Step 6: Setting up few inbox rules to stop the clutter accumulation once again!
Suggested reading –(I'll update this post soon and put up few links for you to read and get more info on this!)
Once you have followed all these steps and then phew!!! A cleaner and organized inbox… finally!!! Yay!!! :) :) :)
Hope you found this post helpful and interesting. Comments and feedback or even ideas which can improve the process even more are welcome!
Till the next post,
Stay stress free and creative!
Cheers,
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