Do you also feel as if your inbox is screaming at you?
Well, this has to happen as, by the end of 2020, 307 billion emails will be sent/received per day. Also, according to McKinsey Global Institute research, email is the second-most time-consuming activity for workers, next to “role-specific tasks”.
These days everyone is working from home. So it might be getting even more difficult to maintain your productivity with your inbox flooding with hundreds of emails every day.
And when it comes to productivity, Emails can be your best friend or your worst enemy. They can make or break your day. They consume time, distract us from our work, and eventually decrease productivity.
I know ’email tips’ is not the most interesting topic to talk about but I generally geek out about this stuff as I like talking about its minute details. So, in this post, I am going to tell you five email tips that can help you manage your email accounts because honestly, we do not need to follow 50 rules to make our lives more efficient. Just follow a few religiously and you are all set. Do follow till the end and I am sure you will find some value out of it.
Archive v/s Delete
The number one thing that you need to understand is the difference between archiving a mail and deleting a mail.
When you delete a mail, it will disappear from your inbox and you will never be able to access it in the future. But, when you archive an email, it will disappear from the inbox but you can always access it in the future. Wait, wait, wait, I know you are thinking of archiving all the emails, right?
Well, then you are not making any progress as the unwanted emails are still sitting in your account. You just can’t see them now.
Open your inbox, and open up an email. Now think for a second and decide whether this email can be of any use in the future to you. If yes, then archive it. And if no (and it will be the answer to most of them), then go ahead and delete it. This takes hardly 2 seconds and following this practice can make you feel so relaxed. Give it a try.
Organize your inbox with labels
Unlikely of how we put labels in our relationships and things generally get complicated after that, this is not the case here. Putting labels to your mails will segregate them into categories and it would then be easy for you to find a particular mail.
These are the labels that I use for my everyday Gmail inbox.
To my knowledge, labels can only be created using a desktop view. If anyone knows how to create them using its mobile application, do let everyone know in the comments section.
To create these labels, follow the following steps.
Open your inbox -> More -> Create new label.
Enter the name of the label and click on the ‘create’ button.
Now, if you wish to nest your label, you can do that as well.
After clicking on ‘create label’, enter the name of the label and check the ‘Nest Label Under’ checkbox and select the parent label under which you wish to nest it and click on the ‘Create’ button.
Pretty simple, isn’t it. But it can save you a lot of confusion and time as well.
Now all you have to do is to create filters according to your needs and put them in their particular labels.
Creating filters
I know Gmail’s search functionality is very impressive but you can make your life way more organized by just creating some filters. How to do it? Follow through till the end and you will get to know how easy it is.
Go to Settings -> ‘Filters and Blocked Addresses’ tab.
Edit or create a new filter for yourself according to your needs.
You can even edit the spam list for your email inbox.
For example, I have applied a filter for my email newsletters which I have subscribed to. Now, they directly go to the subscription label skipping the inbox making my inbox looking cleaner and clutter-free.
Turn on Auto-advance
Isn’t it time taking to always go back to the inbox to open an email after you delete, or archive one? It is, right?
I have enabled a setting called ‘Auto-Advance’ in my inbox which takes me directly to the next mail in the list when I decide to delete, archive, or mute the current mail. You can also do the same if you want to by following the simple steps.
Go to settings.
Under the ‘Advanced’ tab, enable the ‘Auto-advance’ setting and you are good to go.
Unsubscribe from the unwanted emails.
Now, I don’t know about you but I get really upset when people put me on their subscription list without informing me.
Unsubscribing is one thing that can permanently stop those unwanted emails from a credit card agency or some random newsletter from whom you don’t want to receive them.
So, decide for yourself the email ids from whom you don’t want to receive emails any further. These can be the emails that you generally find yourself deleting. Go, and unsubscribe yourself from their email subscription list. This can save you a lot of time and make your life more efficient.
So yeah, this is all that I follow to keep my inbox as empty as possible to get my life together and more efficient.
Thank you so much for reading until the end. I hope you have got some value out of it. Do let me know in the comment section which tip you found most useful.