It’s the 6th and final week of the De-Clutter Your Home challenge. Have you enjoyed this series? I really hope that you have.
The final de-cluttering challenge for you is: de-clutter your email.
Almost everyone is guilty of hoarding emails in their inbox. Please tell me I’m not the only one!
Seeing a cluttered inbox is a bad way to start (or end) the day, so let’s get to work on getting everything organized.
This De-Clutter Your Home challenge will not have a recap next Saturday, because this is more of a “how-to”, rather than a group de-cluttering challenge.
Step #1 – Create Folders Folders are your friend when it comes to de-cluttering your email. Every time a new message shows up in your inbox, you can either respond immediately, or move it to a folder. I currently use (and recommend) the following 3 folders: – Hold: This is a space for you to put shipping confirmations until you receive your item and conversations with people that owe you something. Remember to go through your folders often and delete emails that no longer need to be there. Step #2 – Empty Inbox Habit When you are checking your email, respond immediately if possible, and if you can’t – at least move the email to it’s respective folder and get back to it later. I’ve promised myself that I will not touch any emails in my inbox unless I’m prepared to deal with them (respond or move to a folder) right away. Step #3 – Schedule Reading Time Personally, I check my email once in the morning, once in the afternoon and then once more before bed. I receive hundreds of emails every single day, so I need to check it that often. If you only get a few emails a day, you could probably get away with just checking your inbox once per day. When you click on an email, do something with it immediately. You can either respond or move it to a folder. Whatever you do – don’t read the email and then let it sit in your inbox. Emails start to pile up faster than you can imagine, and then next thing you know you have a cluttered inbox again. Step #4 – Unsubscribe Many emails have an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email message that they send to you. Click that and follow the instructions to remove your email address from their mailing list. If you cannot find an “unsubscribe” link in your email message, you may have to contact the source of the email directly. I recommend removing yourself from all mailing lists that you are not interested in. If you never read the emails from certain companies and manufacturers, you probably don’t need to be subscribed to their mailing list. Step #5 – Separate Email Address To prevent cluttering up your personal email inbox with various emails from stores and manufacturers, set up a separate email address for freebies, etc. You can get free email addresses from tons of places online, but I suggest Hotmail and Gmail. When you sign up for free samples and other online deals, be sure to use this email address instead of your personal one. |
Do you have a suggestion for a future series? Let me know!
More from this series: De-Clutter Your Home
OK Cassie, you’ve laid down the gauntlet on this one!!!
I’ll be bold and post my numbers…1503 emails sitting in the inbox…788 of which show I haven’t even clicked on them!!! That does not count the 17 folders that I have already set up….
A week? Whew, better get moving on it!
A suggestion which I found has helped me is having all my email accounts in one easy program. I use a program for mac and i can view all 3 of my email accounts without having to log in and out. it’s wonderful. Makes checking email that much easier.
Further to Erica’s suggestion, hotmail lets you forward your email. I have 3 hotmail accounts (a very old one, a freebie/spam one, a professional one) and they all get forwarded into one account. Minus the spam of course.
If you don’t want to do that, you can link them together, so you can navigate between them when you log into your account. It saves you having to log in/out repeatedly.
I have 8555 emails in my inbox…oops 🙂
Thank you Jeremy,
I’m feeling much better about my inbox!
I have the most disastrous email inboxes ever. I keep too many things I don’t need and can never find what I do need.
My better half tried to help me get it all sorted out. We use gmail and it has this handy function where you can label your emails. We use labels such as “Reply”, “Receipts”, “Deals” (for groupon type deals), etc. to keep things sorted. What happens is it puts a little coloured button next to your email, and you can also click on a link on the left side of your screen to see only emails with that label. It helps a lot and it’s fast! Plus you can put more than one label on an email if need be.