Many of us have emails that we rarely bother to open. Our inboxes fill with deals, special offers and other things that seemed useful at the time we signed up for them. The next time you receive one of these emails, ask yourself if it’s really important. If it isn’t, unsubscribe. It’s a small action, but it will go a long way to keeping your email organized.
If you have lots of emails that you’d like to unsubscribe from in one go, try using Unroll.Me, which will let you unsubscribe with a few easy clicks.
Perhaps you want to save those email newsletters for a rainy day. Or you maybe you want to save those discount emails, just to be on the safe side. If that’s the case, you can change your email settings so that these messages are saved, but they don’t crowd your inbox. Outlook lets you create rules that will send emails from certain parties straight to a folder, while Gmail lets you create filters to do the same. That way, you can scan through them whenever you want to, but you don’t have to deal with extra noise.
One study has shown that instead of sorting all your email into different folders, it’s faster to just let them go unsorted and just search your inbox when you need a certain email. However, if you get many emails from the same person and you need to reference one, searching through a backlog of message can take lots of time. Instead of spending valuable time sorting and filing away every email, just note the ones you refer to repeatedly. Put these in their own folders. It’s an easy way to find what you need without spending too much time on sorting or searching.
Besides Unroll.me, there are a few other tools that make organizing your inbox easier. For Gmail or Outlook users, Boomerang acts as a reminder service. If you get an email that’s important, but not this-minute urgent, you can tell the software when you’d like to be reminded to answer it. Boomerang will then store it in a file and provide a reminder at the specified time. If you’re an iPhone user, Triage presents email in a simple format that lets you swipe in different directions to delete, forward or save for later. It’s great for when you want to sort your inbox during a few minutes of downtime.