I am attempting to start the year off right by eliminating some of the frustrations from my daily life. One of the areas that drives me the craziest is my email inbox. While I don’t think I’ll reach Inbox Zero, I would love to maybe achieve Inbox Twenty. Here are a few tips to help you take control of your inbox:
- Unsubscribe from as much as humanly possible. I try to opt out of email lists unless I’m really interested in something, but I invariably end up receiving a lot of email that I don’t want. As email comes in, I am asking myself if this is the kind of thing I want to continue receiving; if it isn’t, I immediately unsubscribe. If it continues to come, I send it to spam.
- Consider getting a gmail account. I am a huge fan of gmail. I love the spam filter and many of the other features. In fact, it’s become so popular, I know many people that use it for their business domains with Apps for Business. You can also use it as a central location for a variety of accounts; in addition to my personal gmail account, I have four other email accounts that filter into gmail.
- Automate as much as possible. Gmail has a relatively new tabbed feature which sorts email into five different categories: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. I quickly grew to love this feature. It would be easy to setup something similar in Outlook by setting up rules. In addition to these filters, I have setup a few of my own so that many of my messages skip my inbox. This lets me to choose when I want to process any subscription messages . I also recently added this script to automatically delete some outdated messages.
- Process Once. If you stop to read the email, go ahead and handle the message in that moment. I have a really bad habit of leaving messages in my inbox that I should delete after reading. It’s so much more efficient if I will dispose of it immediately.
- Utilize Canned Responses. I use TypeIt4Me text expander (there’s PhraseExpress for Windows) for canned messages to customers containing proofs of their Etsy order. Gmail offers a similar function with canned responses. I love not having to type the same thing over and over.
What are your tips for controlling your inbox?
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