If you are like me, then you rarely actually take the time to delete or archive your emails. Hence, your mailbox looks like mine with over 2000 messages in the inbox. Granted, I have around 4 email accounts all filtering through my 1 Yahoo! account (with their nice 2 gb storage), but that is beside the point. Irregardless of the amount of emails I get from multiple sources, I should be filing them away and keeping my inbox clean.

2000 messages is ridiculous. So instead of being usefull for roughly 2 hours, I have to spend that time going through all my old email, not knowing necessarily which message has what content, and then decide whether I want to archive or delete it.

The Search Function Yahoo provides is quite nice as I can group all my email’s with their respective senders. However, it all still requires me to go through and actually read some of the messages just to make sure I want to keep them or blow them away. This wastes precious time.

Answer:

Hypothetically, let’s say you check your email 2 times every hour. Do me a favor and decide on the action you want to take with the emails that you have received.

Are they worth keeping?

Is it spam?

Do you need to respond?

Let’s say you have 5 messages that you want to keep, but you don’t want to respond to quite yet. Here is an easy fix.

If you can add folders, then make a folder named @to-read

Adding the @ symbol will typically push it to the top of your folder list (assuming you are organized). Take those 5 messages and transfer them into the @TO-READ folder, and make sure they’re set to unread.

Now, determine what you want to do with the rest of the messages. If they are spam, and you have the option, mark them as spam so that your spam filter will pick up on them and hopefully not allow them in your inbox again.

If you have the time, try and respond to several of the messages. Once you have responded, and you want to keep the original message, then archive it.Make sure you have folders setup for various sections (i.e; Family, Friends, LifeHut , etc.) Then, simply transfer the messages you want to keep into your respective folder.

Delete what you don’t need. Hopefully, in a matter of a few minutes, you have killed many birds with few stones.

If you can maintain this schedule (which is the HARD part), then your inbox will be squeeky clean on a consistent basis. 43 Folders

43 Folders wrote a nice email processing article entitled: Quick Tips on Processing your email box.

The following is a snippet from their article, which we highly suggest you read:

Quick Tips on Processing your email box

The basic idea is to firewall processing as a discrete phase you go through no more than every hour or two at the most. For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it

Zen slap: An email auto-check set for every minute means 60 potential distractions every hour, or almost 500 per day. Look back at a week of your emails and ask yourself: how many distractions was that really worth? How much crucial, instantly actionable email did I receive to make it worth shifting my attention over 2000 times?

43 Folders also knocked out another email article entitled: Five fast email productivity tips.

If you get a chance, read both those articles (along with ours of course )

What do you do to help ease your email frustration?