The Inbox Blues

Has your inbox become a chore all on its own?  In the “old” days, I could end my day with an empty inbox except for the items I needed to deal with in the next few days.  My “Send” box was always emptied each week and filed in the the appropriate folders. Somewhere along the line, these mailboxes became overwhelming. 

Some ideas that have worked for me…..

• Only keep those emails in your Inbox that you absolutely need to respond to in the upcoming week. 
• Unsubscribe to any advertising or newletters you don’t really need to know about. It’s like getting rid of clothes you haven’t worn in the last year.
• Instead of marking these items as “Junk Mail”, get rid of them entirely. 
• If you’ve had back and forth correspondence with someone and the entire conversation is still in the body of the latest email, delete all the previous versions.
• Categorize the emails in your inbox with colours to signify business, personal, “to read”, etc. Then you can sort by Category and deal with all in that Category at the same time.
• I would suggest moving all your “to read” emails into a Reading folder but there lies the danger of “out of sight, out of mind”, but this method may work for you.
• Emails with subjects that need to be dealt with in the near future but not immediately: drag them over to your Calender and set a BF date. You’ll have the body of the email right there in that day’s schedule. Then move the email itself to an appropriate Subject folder.
• When deleting or moving emails in your Sent folder, try sorting them first by Subject and clearing them, then by To or From. You’ll find it easier to delete in batches, particularly when you’re deleting emails to and from personal contacts.

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