How many of you look at your email inbox and immediately feel overwhelmed? You are not alone! In this day and age emails come fast and furious. Not only are you getting emails for your job and personal life but it is a huge market for stores to send all of their advertisements and sales through email.

So where do you begin when it comes to organizing everything? Here are some steps that you can use to cut down your emails and time spent in your inbox!

Step one:

If you have hundreds (okay, maybe thousands even) of unread emails, it’s safe to assume that the majority of them are ready to be trashed! Go through your emails and delete anything you know you don’t need to read or follow-up on. A great way to start this is to group your emails by “from” instead of date. That way your emails will be sorted for you and if you know you want to delete all the emails from a certain sender they will all be in one spot for you.

–My tip for this is to use your “control” button on your computer and hold it down to select each email you know you don’t need (this saves you time from clicking delete hundreds of times)–

Step Two:

Now that you’ve gotten rid of all the “junk”, all that should be left are emails you either a) want to read or b) need to be answered!

This is where two tips come in! Select all the emails in your inbox that have information you would like to read but don’t need to follow-up with. Create a folder for these emails (mine is called “Read Later”). When you have some spare time, now you will have all the emails in one place to easily access for reading.

Okay, now onto the emails that need to be followed up on. I use 3 folders for this. The first folder is where you put all the emails that need to be followed up on now (okay today). The second folder put any email that can wait a couple days for a reply. Lastly, create a folder that contains emails that need to be dealt with by the end of the week!

This way when you sit down to work on your emails you will know where to start! Make sure you complete the “today” emails first and then move on to the “couple days” and “this week” emails.

Look for a blog post in the future about organizing your day to include a set time (or times) for managing your emails!

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