Organizing your inbox helps make you more efficient in addressing urgent messages and keeping track of your communications, especially in business.
Creating a profile of your communications helps you determine what messages you prioritize, what messages to filter out for reading later, and what messages to send directly to the archives.
Maximize the features of your email app and make your inbox more organized by building your email profile. Here’s how:
Examine Your Email Habits
Who do you communicate with on a regular basis? What types of messages do you open as soon as you receive them? Create a list of your priority contacts.
Categorizing these contacts early on also helps make organizing emails easier. A good starting point is to create a list with your work contacts, personal contacts, emails from suppliers, transaction emails and services & utilities reminders included.
Create Email Filters Based On Your Priority List
You can group emails automatically without having to open the message first, and check out the low priority messages later on.
You will have to create an email filter for each priority list as well as for the low-priority messages. The good thing about filters is that you can create your own settings for each.
For regular marketing newsletters, for example, you can send them straight to a folder or to archive and mark them as read so they do not clutter your inbox. Your priority business messages can be automatically tagged as Important or Starred.
You can also set the notification settings on your mobile – you can turn on push notifications for priority contacts and turn them off for low-priority messages.
Train Your Spam Filter
Do you get many unsolicited marketing newsletters? Are your subscriptions sending more messages than you thought you signed up for? That’s what your spam filter is for.
Training your spam filter takes a few days, but it’s worth the few minutes you’ll spend marking messages as spam.
Algorithms get smarter by the day, and training your spam filter anywhere between three days to a week makes it easier for these algorithms to identify the messages you don’t want to see and flag them as spam.
Clean Out Your Inbox Regularly
You don’t have to keep all your messages – communications that are over a year old can be deleted as long as they don’t contain important documents.
Make sure to purge your inbox of any old or unwanted emails so that it doesn’t clutter your email. This makes it easy for you to spot the important messages that you still need to address.
By being more aware of your mailing habits and your frequent communications, you can create an inbox profile that streamlines your communication process and declutters your mail.
Take the step to organizing your information and start observing your email habits to determine who matters to you.
