How to Organize Your Email
Does thinking about your email make your heart rate spike? You're not alone. What used to be a low-tech way to stay in touch has become a minefield of advertising, newsletters, and notifications. Email very quickly becomes a digital dumping ground and it's not your fault!
Before we jump into how to organize email, let's talk about why we use email. Everyone has their own little world and prioritizes different things in their communication. I have two main inboxes – my work email and my personal email. In both inboxes, I want to receive important updates about things that matter to me in my work and personal lives. In order to receive those updates, I have to cut out a lot of noise. Ask yourself – what is it that I am hoping to get out of my email inbox? What matters to me in this realm of communication?
I like to use my inbox as a to-do list – I keep it empty of anything other than items that require some kind of action. Before you dump all of your emails into your archive and start fresh, take stock of what you have and how you want to organize it moving forward.
Let's get back to our handy SPACE acronym to tackle email clean-out and organization.
S - Sort
You can view your email many different ways. If you are using Apple Mail or Outlook, you have the capability of sorting by the email sender. This is a helpful way to purge emails that come in large volumes from the same senders. If you have ever signed up for a newsletter, purchased an item online, or donated to a political campaign, you know what I'm talking about.
P - Purge
Don't rush to delete every one of those emails yet – first you need to be sure that you unsubscribe so that they don't continue to flood your inbox. Some newsletters and update emails are great, but there are not enough hours in the day to get value out of every list that you are signed up for. Frankly, the vast majority of these emails are trying to sell you something. You can use a service like unroll.me to reduce the volume that enters your inbox, but that does not actually remove you from these lists. Unsubscribing is a time intensive process but it is the best way to clear your email and make it more functional for the future.
If you've sorted by sender (or searched for the promotional sender that you know you need to cut off), click on the most recent email and scroll to the bottom. Somewhere in the body of the email there will be a tiny link to "Unsubscribe" (usually at the bottom). Click that link and open the webpage that it brings you to. You will often have to "confirm" you’re unsubscribing - if you don't complete this step, you will stay on the list. Every promotional sender is legally required to offer their readers an option to unsubscribe, but they do not have to make it easy. Once you have unsubscribed you can delete the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of promotional emails that you have received from this sender. Now, on to the next one!
A - Assign
After you have cleared out some of the junk, it should be more clear to you what emails you want to keep for action or reference. This is another time to consider why you have the emails that you do have and what you want to do with them long term. They will continue to pile up over time (and take up an increasingly large amount of storage space). If you don't have another digital storage solution for your photos, files, and events, email might be your preferred space for filing and archiving information.
C - Contain
We need to understand the categories that matter in your inbox as we start containing them. For example, a personal inbox could be organized into folders labeled:
Friends & Family
Health
Finances
Community Work
Shopping
Your categories have to come from you and the things that are most important to you. Creating and editing email folders (they are also called Labels or Mailboxes in some apps) is a quick way to identify the different types of communications that you receive. Beware of creating too many folders, though. You want your "top level" folders to be pretty straightforward so that they are easy to navigate. Create subfolders under these basic categories as needed, but try to keep it simple to start.
Now that you have created even more functional folder categories, and considered how you want to store your emails (and the data attached to them), you can get everything into folders. If you plan to use your inbox as a to do list, every email has three potential outcomes: task, file, or delete. Try to keep your filing structure simple so that these decisions are easy!
E - Equalize
This is the hard part. How do you keep your email clear to be able to use it functionally? Regular, methodical maintenance. Time blocking can be a great strategy for this - take 15 minutes every weekday to clear out your email. If the volume is still too high and you are struggling to manage your email priorities, consider what other things you might be able to unsubscribe from.
Email is like any other digital tool - a tool! You decide if, when, and how to use it depending on the needs of your life. If you've read any of my blog posts, you'll know that I love to talk about how deeply personal organizing is. Digital organizing is no different. How you choose to keep track of yourself digitally depends on your priorities and how you want to spend your time.
Does this still feel like an unmanageable task? Our recently updated Digital Organizing Course is launching on August 1. Purchase this course before September 1 to take a concrete step to a more digitally organized life! If even more support would be helpful, schedule a complimentary consultation to get started!
