Clear Clutter from Your Inbox

Working here in my new office has done me a lot of good. Because I’m working with several clients at the same time, I have to be organized or I will get lost in all the paperwork and the myriad of meetings, documents and emails I’m getting from them. One of the first things I did was to clean up my workstation so that only the essentials are there. Everything else (i.e. scissors, scotch tape, bondpaper, etc.) I can borrow from someone else in the office anyway, so I let go of the urge to hoard my own supplies.The next step is uncluttering your inbox. What is essential here is to have a Gmail account because it provides you the ability to put labels and archive your posts. This makes for a really uncluttered inbox (in fact, my rule is to have 0 messages at the end of every day). Anything you will need later on will be available by searching for it or looking for its label.

I open my gmail three times a day: when I reach the office in the morning, at around 130pm (after lunch) and just before I go home in the afternoon. Unless there’s a need to chat with someone using the Google Talk feature, I do not open my inbox at any other time. This prevents me from taking too much time on email which should be spent doing something else.

When I open my inbox, I do one of four things to EVERY email:

1) Erase — if the email’s not important, or if I have read it and I do not need to reply to it.
2) Reply — I try to reply immediately if the email only needs a quick reply. If it will take longer, I label it FOR REPLY and archive it.
3) Label — I then label each email according to its category. I have labels for each CLIENT, for PERSONAL emails, for IDEAS and FUTURE BLOG POSTS.
4) Archive — I then archive all the labeled emails.

Voila! my inbox has ZERO emails.

At the end of the day, I just go to my FOR REPLY label and reply accordingly.

Here are the tips mentioned in Problogger’s quest to move from 10,000 emails to 0 in 24 hours, :

1. Move all email to GMAIL. To do this I forwarded all of my previous email addresses and contact forms so that they now arrive in my Gmail inbox.

2. Merciless Unsubscribing. Email 101 lessons always say that you should unsubscribe to as many newsletters as you can. I was getting about 50 a week, most of which I didn’t EVER read. The first thing I did on Sunday was to unsubscribe from most of them and delete the majority of past ones that I’d put in my ‘read one day’ folder.

3. Gmail Filtering and Labels I’d heard for some time now how good Gmail was at filtering but until the weekend I’d not investigated it. I so wish someone had sat me down earlier and forced me to do it. On Sunday I saw down for an hour and went through every email that I’d received for the last week. I didn’t do this to catch up on email but to get a filtering system in place.

4. Identify the important stuff I have some emails that I consider extra specially important. Email from my wife, boss (at b5), email from my contact forms on my blogs, any email with the words ‘I hate you’….. You know the kind.

With this type of email I again use filtering but instead of hiding it I highlight it. So any email coming from my wife’s email address, or with certain words in it, or a certain subject line (eg my contact form’s) I can set up with a label like ‘important’. I could also assign it with a ’star’ (like a flag in many email clients). Even more ‘attention grabbing’ is the ability to assign labels with colors. So for example I’ve assigned the label ‘ProBlogger Email’ (all email from my contact form) as having a bright ORANGE label to catch my attention so that I can quickly see them in my inbox when i wake up in the morning.

1. Ang Peregrino Recommends: ZenHabits
2. Uncluttering Your Laundry