Life has been crazy in 2022. I've found myself super busy and my email boxes have started to fill up since I've had no time to take care of them. Does that sound like your Gmail inbox?
It's not just enough to delete emails you need a long term organization plan to keep the clutter at bay and to be able to find important emails.
Deal with the backlog
Like going through and organizing other areas of your life it helps to take care of the clutter before you start organizing. Does your number of unread emails total in the thousands?
Many of these emails are probably not even relevant anymore, you should just go ahead and delete those types of emails.
Unsubscribe to all the things
Are you like me who signs up for any and every email list to get deals but it ends up filling your inbox with countless emails you don't even open? Start unsubscribing!
You could do this manually or there are ways to automate it. First manually is you going in and unsubscribing as you receive the emails. This can be a little tedious but if you're like me and you prefer to be more meticulous before making anything permanent this is the way to go.
To have a more automated approach there are digital tools you can use. I've used a program called Unroll.Me in the past. I really liked it because it helped me see email lists I was on but wasn't aware of so I was able to get off all sorts of random lists.
Set up a folder system
Do you find yourself scrolling for days or praying that you are able to find an email through the search bar? It's time to work on setting up a folder system using the Labels then.
Under your inbox settings you'll find a tab called Labels. I have labels set up for all of my different emails. Like my Pampered Chef business I have a folder for vendor events, host emails and receipts from business purchases.
Think through what labels make the most sense for your needs and set them up. You can then work on moving the emails you NEED to save to the folders. Don't save emails that you don't need though!
Set up filters
List servs are a major tool that museum and archive professionals use. I'm on many of them and for the longest time they would clog up my in box. Finally I figured out that I could set up a filter to send them straight to a folder and check them later.
You can automatically send incoming emails to specific folders. Open an email you want to add a filter to then click the three vertical dots on top of the email and click "Filter messages like these".
You'll see a form to fill in. You can filter things from a single email address, list serv, by keyword and several other filters. On the next screen you'll be able to pick what you do with the emails. So my professional list serv emails I have set up to filter the list serv emails directly to a specific folder.
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