Best Tips on How to Organize Your Email

Organize your email, they say, and you’ll be a lot less overwhelmed and more productive.

Indeed, most people these days feel overwhelmed by the number of emails they have in their inboxes. According to a 2017 survey by email marketing company Campaigner, nearly half of consumers say they receive too many emails from businesses and merchants.

A report by cloud-based Enterprise Work Management provider Workfront found that US employees average 199 unread or unopened emails in their inboxes at any given time. “Excessive emails” was found to be the second most chosen thing when it comes to what hinders productivity at 53%, second only to “wasteful meetings” at 57%.

No matter what your work situation may be, you, too, may struggle to manage your inbox every day. Worse, the time you spend trying to manage it can cut into your writing time. To keep your email from getting out of control, try these tips from a few experts on the matter.

1. Organize Your Email by Starting Fresh

This one just makes sense. Before you can get into a regular habit of organizing your email, you need to start with a freshly cleaned inbox. Take some time on an evening or weekend to go through and delete any emails you no longer need.

Once those are gone, you can use the following tips to organize the rest, but be sure to start with as many emails deleted as possible.

2. Commit to Organizing Your Email Every Day

Starting the day with a cleared-out inbox is much less stressful than opening your email program only to find hundreds of old messages staring you in the face.

“Make it part of your routine, like lunch, a coffee break, daily sales meeting or revenue report,” writes Rhett Power on Inc. “It’s something you schedule, not something you might squeeze in at the last minute.”

3. Set Up a Different Email Address for Newsletters

Most experts recommend that you unsubscribe from newsletters you’re not reading. That’s an approach that works for many people. Me, I like to keep a separate email address for my subscriptions for a couple of reasons.

One, the separate email address keeps the newsletters away from my regular emails so I don’t have to review them until I’m ready. It gives me more control. Second, it allows me to keep subscriptions to newsletters I find valuable, but maybe don’t read every time. When I review the list, I can pick and choose which ones might be useful to me at that moment and dump the rest.

This approach makes organization easy without forcing me to miss out on those newsletters I like but may not always have time to read.

You likely already have a personal and work email address. Adding one more to contain your newsletters and any other “extra” emails can help save you time while reducing your stress.

4. Organize Your Email Later with Boomerang

This tip comes from Alex Cavoulacos over at “The Muse.” He suggests using the plugin “Boomerang” (available on Gmail and Outlook) to manage those emails you don’t need to deal with until later.

“You can schedule an email to disappear and come back later—when you’re ready to deal with it—leaving your inbox clearer until then,” Cavoulacos writes. Boomerang has other capabilities too, including allowing you to send an email at a later time and to set up recurrent emails. It will even send you a reminder if someone doesn’t get back to you.

5. Organize Your Email Into Five Folders

Marketing expert Zach Hanlon suggests that instead of creating your email folders based on topics, you base them on deadlines instead. He writes on Fast Company, “The system that saved my sanity requires only five folders,” including the following:

  1. Inbox: This is simply a holding pen. “Emails shouldn’t stay here any longer than it takes for you to file them into another folder. The exception to this rule is when you respond immediately and are waiting for an immediate
  2. Today: Include in this folder every email that requires a response today.
  3. This week: All emails that require a response before the end of the week.
  4. This month/quarter: Choose which one works best for you.
  5. FYI: “Most items I receive are informational,” Hanlon writes. “If I think I may need to reference an email again, I’ll save it to this folder.”

Once you have this system set up, stick with it daily. Writes Hanson, “We tend to get more lax about newly adopted habits as their newness rubs off. But I’ve actually gotten better over time at sticking to my five-folder rule. I’m ruthless about deleting emails that don’t require my attention.”

6. Set Aside Certain Times to Go Through Your Emails

It’s not easy to resist opening emails as they come in. Our brains enjoy that hit of dopamine we get when we get a message from someone, even if it’s just from a work colleague or an organization.

That means you need to schedule times to review the emails in your inbox, and then close your program the rest of the time. Aliya Chaudhry writes in The Verge, “If you don’t need to be on the lookout for important emails or announcements, schedule in a few short periods during the day to check your email. Other than that, stay out of your inbox.”

In other words, close the app or program and get on with writing!

She also recommends setting aside a longer chunk of time once a week to catch up on your organization, make new folders, or send longer emails.

7. Organize Your Email by Following a “Delete-First” Approach

John Simpson, writing on Medium, suggests that you be a little more aggressive when reviewing your email, and delete those emails you know that you don’t really need.

“Inboxes work best when approached with the ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality,” he writes. “You probably know at first glance which emails are worth reading and which ones aren’t.”

We tend to keep some of those unnecessary emails out of some sense of obligation or worry of missing out. Don’t waste your time: “Reading junk emails may seem like a good idea at the time until you realize you’ve spent the last two hours flipping through funny photos and spam ads. Delete the junk, read the keepers after.”

(For more help on increasing your productivity, check out Overwhelmed Writer Rescue!)

How do you organize your email?

2 Comments

  1. These tips are needed! I spend so much of my writing time clearing out emails and I want to get off that merry-go-round! Thank you, Colleen!

    1. Author

      For sure! We need that time to write! Thanks, Jan. :O)

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