The average person receives an average of 100+ emails a day. Now think about the time spent managing those emails. (Or are you one of those that just let email messages pile up?) Unfortunately, not all of us have so much time to dedicate to email organization, and sometimes this can be a problem.
There are those who do not mind having thousands of e-mails in their inbox. However, this can be an improper habit as we will definitely miss out on important information. You might even spend more time trying to sift through emails to search for one on particular. To help you with your day-to-day task without interference, here are some tips to maintain that inbox.

Here are the best to tips on how to organize your e-mail inbox

Purge as much as you can

Set aside an hour or 2 to just purge any old emails you don’t need. Use this time to start making folders or labels in your inbox as well. You’ll want a fresh slate for your email. It might help to search all the emails “from” a certain address, then if you know you don’t need to see emails from them, hit “select all” and delete.

Have multiple emails set up

I have one for family, one for work and business matters, then one for promotional signups. That way it’s easier to prioritize which inbox to check first. Your personal and more important email account doesn’t have to get bogged down with promotional emails or newsletters either.

Turn off email alerts

Leaving your email alerts on can play against your productivity. According to a recent university research, it takes an average of 64 seconds to fully recover the concentration once we open an e-mail. This act (looking at your mail continually) prevents us from completing a task at the most optimal time.
Unless for work reasons where you have to answer everyone the minute you receive an email, the best thing you can do is turn off the alerts initiated by your incoming emails.
You have to keep in mind that most of the e-mails we receive do not require an immediate response. Hence, we suggest you look at these messages two or three times a day so that it does not disturb your concentration.

Unsubscribe

A common user erases an average of 71 e-mails from the 147 he receives daily, which takes about 5 minutes.
If we do a few mathematical operations, this takes about 24 hours a year. Surprising, right? You waste an entire day of your life erasing e-mails that do not interest you!
In order to recover some time, we recommend that you unsubscribe from all the mailing lists you are not interested in and probably are not of any importance to you. Be they promotions, points, coupons services, bulletins from different web pages, etc – we can decide whether we want to keep them or not. Unsubscribe from them and reduce the email chatter.

Learn to archive emails

Many are those who deny the option of archiving emails for fear that later they will not be able to find an e-mail. However, this does not mean that you are deleting a message, you are only moving it from the folder. Locating an email today is easier than ever if you hit the keywords. This will take a great weight off you, even if at first it’s a real headache.
For example, you can start moving all those emails that exceed 30 days and that you have not checked again. Remember that you are not deleting them, you are only moving them from the folder. Of course, if you think that there are some which are useless, do not be afraid to delete them!

Giving priorities

You can decide which messages you want to see first in the inbox in many of the top email sites. You have the option to sort the inbox according to a series of criteria, such as choosing to first see the emails of the addresses that write you most frequently, see those you tend to answer more, see messages that you have classified as important, or those that your mail considers as a priority.

Create filters by directions

Taking advantage of the fact that we have created our thematic tags, some email services allow us, from the ‘configuration’ section, to create filters by sending addresses and automate their sending to a specific tag. Thus, we can create labels for important people, or for invoices, for example, so that when they write to us from their preferred addresses, they are automatically saved in the corresponding folder, which we can always consult.

Create filters by words

Another option that you have available is to create filters by words that appear in the subject of the message, or by the complete message, and make them go to a certain label. This will make it more difficult for you to pass unnoticed a certain email that you judge as a priority.

Determine which addresses never send spam

When you create a filter for certain addresses or words, you can mark that it is never sent to spam. This means, at least in theory, the reduction in risk of an important message going into the spam folder due to a system error.
Sometimes, some important messages are classified as spam. It is very rare, but not dismissable. It is not really good that you give yourself a daily flip through this folder to make sure that something has leaked that should not be there. Therefore, we can apply this option on each of our reliable mail addresses.

Apply a color to each label

Also, from the option to create labels, we have the alternative of applying a color to each label. Once the label is created, with the right button, we can open a menu where the option to choose the color will appear. This color will automatically be applied to all messages on the label. This will allow us to quickly see in the inbox what label is assigned to each email that arrives to us.

Use the stars to determine important emails

Another option available is to mark the important emails with a star, in order to later return to them through the corresponding label, which the service creates by default. In parallel, the system assimilates the senders of these emails as a priority and will place them in the main email tab which is what we see by default. In this regard, it is important to note that it is important to look from time to time in the rest of the tabs to see that an important message does not slip into them.

Set limits

Setting how many unopened messages you allow yourself to have in your inbox is the first step to make sure you do not have too many. If you allow yourself to have only 20 unopened messages no matter how many of them reach you out of that number, you should read them to ensure you reach your goal and maintain order.

The most successful professionals organize their emails to get more out of them and increase their productivity. In this note, we teach you how to do it like them. You may think that learning how to organize your email is a useless task, but when you learn to do it well, you will find that it is not, as this practice will definitely save you lots of time.

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