8 Easy Steps To Transform Your Email Inbox From A Nightmare To Reassuringly Empty… Even If It’s Currently Full, With Over 10,000 Messages!

Is your email inbox a nightmare?

Inboxes can become a dumping ground, where it’s easy to miss the important messages. It also wastes time, clutters up your mind, creates stress, and even avoidance, which just compounds the problem.

Being disorganised is one thing, but…

I read that research into how employees use email has found over 30% of people check their emails 30 to 40 times an hour! That’s every 1 ? to 2 minutes!!

Also, apparently, it’s only 6 seconds before 70% of emails receive a reply! How are people getting any work done?

Whatever the statistics, emails can be a huge distraction.

1. So let’s start with a few tips to remain proactive during your working day:

• Turn off your message alerts. Be in control of your day, don’t let every incoming email take your focus away from productive work
• Set specific blocks of time each day to look at your emails. Research carried out by Ashish Gupta, Ramesh Shard and Robert Greve identified that checking emails between 2 and 4 times each day is optimum for the balance between productivity and responsiveness
• In the past, I’ve marked emails as high, medium and low priority. It never worked for me. Simply highlight those you feel are your highest priority, nothing more. Only when those have all been dealt with, go through what’s left and highlight those you now consider your highest priority. Deal with these and repeat. Having one single priority keeps you more focused

2. How does having zero emails in your inbox sound?

From having a seriously ‘out of control’ inbox, I found reducing it to zero emails gave me far greater clarity of thought.

 What did I do? I created 4 folders:

•  Action
• Delegate
• Filing
• Reading

 Tip: When labelling the folders, use a character before the title, e.g. !Action, so they’re immediately below the inbox.

 Go through each email one at a time.

 The golden rule is if you can deal with it within 2 minutes, deal with it.

 Can it be deleted or dealt with? Either do so, or if not, do the following…

• Any action you have to do, but will take over 2 minutes, put it in the Action folder
•  If you can ask someone else to do it, forward it to them, adding the email to the Delegate folder
•  Is it information only with no action? It’s the filing folder for these
•  Is it an article or similar you want to read but isn’t urgent? Add it to the Reading folder

Schedule between 2 & 4 times each day to do this, not forgetting to also schedule times to do the outstanding actions.

 This simple system helped me be more organised and saved a lot of time.

3. What if I’ve got 1,000’s of emails in my inbox?

Now I bet you’re saying to yourself “that’s all well and good, you’ve probably only got 10 or 20 emails in your inbox. I’ve got 100’s, I’m probably into the 1,000’s in my inbox!”

If that’s the case, the answer is to set up a ‘Temp Archive’ folder. Then do one of two things.

Either:

Take the drastic approach

Put all emails into the temp archive folder. You’ve now got an empty inbox and you commit to starting the good habits from now.

Although this is drastic, you’ve not deleted anything, so you know where to find any email you may still need.

Or:

Take the considered approach

Sort emails by oldest to newest and put all emails older than 12 months into the Temp Archive folder. What’s left? Still got over 200 emails?

Repeat this again, this time putting all emails that are 9 months old into the Temp Archive folder.

Still have over 200 emails left?

If so, repeat this for all emails over 6 months old and then over 3 months old if necessary.

Why 200 emails?

This is a manageable number to handle properly, i.e. to put into the Action, Delegate, Filing and Reading folders.

Keeping your inbox under control, i.e. empty, allows you to be more focused throughout your working day.

4. If this all sounds a bit too drastic for you, here’s another idea we’ve used for clients.

In fact, we used this for a client who had over 10,000 emails in his inbox when we first started working together.

Create folders for each year you have emails from, e.g. if you have emails going back to 2019, create separate folders for 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Within each yearly folder, create sub-folders for each month. To avoid them being placed in alphabetical order, number them as well, i.e. 1 January, 2 February, 3 March etc.

Sort emails by oldest to newest and put all emails from the oldest month into its appropriate folder. So if you have emails going back to May 2019, put them into the May 2019 folder.

Repeat this month by month until you are left with emails from the current month and the previous month, i.e. April and May 2021 as of today.

When you get to 1st June, put all emails from April into the April folder. Repeat this process each month.

 While this doesn’t get your inbox down to zero, this system keeps it under control. You haven’t deleted any emails; they can still be found easily.

 And by the way, our client with over 10,000 emails doesn’t miss them from his inbox!

5. Inbox Rules

Another way of becoming more time efficient with your emails is to set up some inbox rules.

This is where emails automatically go into a specific folder rather than your inbox.

Creating rules has several advantages:

• They don’t get caught up amongst the general emails you receive, running the risk they get missed
• There are less emails building up in your inbox, which means you save time when you process all the emails in your inbox
• You save time searching for important emails as you know where they are going to be

There are two main categories of rules we can create:

1. All emails received from a specific person goes into their own folder.

This makes it easy to see emails from people who are important to your business and it is clear if you have an unread email.

2. All emails containing a specific word or phrase in the subject goes into its own folder.

If you send an email to several people, when they reply, the subject line will put the replies into the same folder. This helps keep emails about a certain subject in one place. Again, any unread emails will be highlighted.

Hope this is all helping. If you have any questions along the way, particularly about email rules, please don’t hesitate to ask.

6. Scheduling an email to be sent at a different time

This next tip is not so much of an email time saving tip but more of a general time efficiency tip.

If you create an email outside of work hours, you can schedule it to be sent at a different time.

For example, you’re watching Match of the Day on a Saturday night and, for whatever reason, you think of an email you need to send to a colleague or client and feel you have to do it before you forget. You really don’t want to interrupt their weekend, so you schedule the email to arrive in their inbox on Monday at 9.00 am. This (a) makes you look efficient and (b) avoids you looking like a sad person for sending emails at 10.45 pm on a Saturday!

To do this in Gmail:

-         Type the email

-         On the send button, click on down arrow (More send options)

-         Click ‘Schedule send’

-         Choose your date and time

-         Click ‘Schedule send’ to send the email

To do this in Outlook:

-         Type the email

-         Click ‘Options’

-         Choose ‘Delay Delivery’

-         In Delivery Options, look for ‘Do not deliver before’

-         Add in your date and time

-         Close

-         Send email

This is a tip that can be useful in many cases, not just during Match of the Day!

7. How to stop emails being a time distraction throughout the day

Of course, email is vital in your business. It’s the quickest way to send and receive important and valuable information. But it can often control you rather than you being in control of your email.

Here’s a quick thought on how to regain control so you focus on what’s important in your business.

First, turn off all email alerts, which we talked about right at the beginning of this article.

Next, set specific blocks of time each day to process emails.

Research shows doing this between 2 and 4 times each day is the optimum balance.

This allows you to respond to emails in a reasonable timeframe and at the same time, giving you quality time to focus on important tasks and actions without constant interruption.

Setting the same times each day develops the habit of being in control of your emails. Otherwise, you risk falling back into the old habit of responding to every email distraction.

Doing this for the first time, you’ll probably feel most comfortable setting 4 times a day, e.g.

-         8.30 am

-         11.30 am

-         1.30 pm

-         3.30 pm

As you get to enjoy focusing more quality, uninterrupted time on your revenue generating actions, you may feel more comfortable reducing processing your emails down to 3 times a day, or even 2! 

8. How to ensure your email action folder doesn’t become a dumping ground for your inbox.

We’ve talked previously about how to be more time efficient with your email inbox, i.e. getting it to zero emails by creating Action, Delegate, Filing and Reading folders. The trouble is it’s easy to focus on keeping your email inbox under control and then forgetting about what’s in the action folder, your most important folder.

A good, time-efficient way to handle this is to schedule specific times during the week to deal with the emails in your action folder.

You could schedule 1 hour every day, or maybe 2 hours on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Whatever times you schedule, make them fit into your working week, not the other way round. If something comes up during your ‘action email’ time, then reschedule the email time.

Take 5 minutes to scan through all the emails in your action folder and then prioritise them in order of importance.

Of course, some of these emails may already be on your daily or weekly to-do list, but it’s important to get into the habit of consistently handling the emails in your action folder. Otherwise it will just build up and become the mess your inbox used to be! 

There you have it. Eight easy steps to transform your email inbox from a nightmare to reassuringly empty… even if it’s currently full, with over 10,000 emails.

If your inbox currently has 1,000s of emails, which you are finding overwhelming, and you are worried that sorting them out will take you away from your revenue generating activities, we can sort it out for you.

We can highlight each one that needs your attention and file the rest in folders that are easy for you to navigate.

Simply get in touch and let’s have a conversation.