To most people, the inbox is a soul-sucking black hole of follow-up messages, annoying staff correspondences, and newsletters or press releases and much much more. If you were to also ask these people if they could ever see themselves getting through their entire inbox every single day, most would scoff at the idea of such an impossible feat.
[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]T[/su_dropcap]o get down to inbox zero every day , you need some important lessons that’ll help manage your inbox better moving forward. None of the things that will help are groundbreaking but strategies and all you need to do is implementing them and following through.
Put “Answering Email” on Your Schedule
Check your email constantly, make a schedule like everything else important to you, soon you shall stop questioning when to send or answer your next email, just make time for it.
Answer Most Emails Right Away
About 65-70% of the emails in your inbox require quick responses that take me less than a minute or two to write. Too often,we get in a bad habit of just leaving them in the inbox and convincing ourselves “these are easy. I’ll get to them later.”
Well, forcing yourself to answer those correspondences right then and there during the precious “email answering” time, will get more things out of your inbox and off the mind—and move closer to that elusive inbox zero.
Push Other Emails to Strategic Times
First of all, in regard to this, you have to get and install the Boomerang app on Gmail, It’s a lifesaver!
Very simply, Boomerang allows you to reschedule when emails appear in your inbox. While it might sound like cheating to just schedule everything for later (“I got to inbox zero tonight by scheduling 45 emails to show up in my inbox tomorrow morning!”), the point is to be strategic with how you use it.
Being able to schedule what came into my inbox when has made a huge difference in my productivity and how much I was able to get done, and i wan the same for you and all those going through this article in the hope of achieving inbox zero!
Use Labels or Folders
Mark my words: Don’t use your inbox as some sort of landfill to dump all of your emails; use labels, tabs, or folders (whatever your email provider calls them) to properly organize and file everything you receive.
I have over 10 different labels on my email account, and while that might sound obsessive or specific, it does help me quickly retrieve messages I need and file things once I’m done with them, making my inbox seem a whole lot less scary
I file each email (depending on their nature/source ) under their respective Prospect-related folders so that they only pop up if there’s a new message. This physically clears out my inbox of things I’ve already dealt with, which makes other stuff in turn feel a whole lot more manageable.
Unsubscribe from Email Lists
This tip is pretty self-explanatory: Get rid of all the fluff. Do you just go straight to the trash can icon in your inbox when certain newsletters arrive? Just unsubscribe. And don’t even pull the “But I might read this later!” excuse. My rule of thumb is that if I delete a newsletter three times in a row, I unsubscribe on the spot.
I personally read a lot of newsletters for various gigs, so to get through the slog, I used Boomerang to find more convenient times for newsletters I liked to appear in my inbox, and I unsubscribed from everything else.
By changing your email habits, you have made the whole process of receiving and sending emails a whole lot easier —and saved tons of time doing it. Now who doesn’t love that?
If you know someone who can benefit from this, hey why don’t you share this article with them too!
