Your Guide to Cleaning Up your Inbox in One Hour

The last thing you ever want to see is thousands of emails piling up in your inbox and you don’t know where to start! So many emails are too overwhelming for you to respond and you don’t have the slightest clue on what to do. It is mainly because of mismanagement from your part. If you have been well calculative from the very beginning, you shouldn’t have to worry about the situation you are currently in. So, make sure to follow the guide now to clean up the inboxes within an hour. There are so many of them and depending on your needs, you better choose one.

Create your very own labels and folders:

It will hardly take 10 to 30 minutes of your precious time to create folders and labels for the emails you are receiving or will receive in the future. This way, you can start organizing the messages which don’t have any action left but you still want to keep it anyway.

• Email users are currently using so many types of folder systems. However, one easy way is to try making folder for every topic of type of email with various messages related to it.
• Some of the examples of such folders are projects, receipts, trips and more. If you want, you can even add and adapt some of the folders as you get to learn what works best for you.
• For speeding up this procedure, you can create a folder namely “To File Later” for any email you are not quite sure of. There you can have another “unsubscribe” folder for things you don’t want like unsubscriber app and more.
• For getting somewhat more organized than this one, try out some of the labels to add more information to messages. There are multiple labels available on email or various label layers too.

Start prioritizing urgent and re-assign irrelevant ones:

First of all, make sure to deal with the emails which are urgent and major from people with highest priority for the job. Scan through your inbox for the emails you get from project team, manager or somebody of the same sort.

• Here, you are actually looking for emails from some major people that you don’t want to fall through cracks. If you actually can, try to process those immediately. If you want, you can add a label to it as well.
• In case, you are actually using Outpost, it will be pretty simple and easy to assign email to specified person to team in case you are not the right person to respond to it.
• If you ever find yourself in email response bottleneck, assigning the emails to anyone else on the team can be pretty helpful.

Use 2 minutes rule or make a to-do list for emails with action:

Once you are done with your basic selection and folder creation, you are left with few ones in need of action. If those actions can be taken care of within a span of not more than 2 minutes then do it now!

1. In case, you need more time to work on those messages, try adding them to your to-do list with reminder notification. Later, you have to archive email to keep inboxes clear.
2. In case, you are not much of a list maker, you can try using the “snooze” feature, new one from Gmail. It will actually help the email to show up in inboxes whenever you are all set to handle it with ease.
3. For the outlook users, the “follow-up” feature is one to watch out for! It will help you to do the same. This entire procedure won’t take more than 30 to 50 minutes of your precious time!

Shorter replies to emails with further action on:

When you have replied to the main emails within your inbox, it is time to shower some love to less prioritized tasks. Right now, it is better to respond to emails within an hour or less. For other emails, reply quickly with basic email telling them you will contact them later for details. You can further set up few templates so that you can just forward it to necessary emails.

In no time, you can clear up your inbox from the mess and have everything under control!

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