Unclogging Your Inbox In 3 Simple Steps…

A cluttered email inbox can be difficult to navigate – not to mention you might miss an important email! Keeping your inbox clean will give you peace of mind and help you keep all your email correspondence organised.

If you suffer with inbox insanity, try these handy techniques on how to keep your Outlook email inbox clean and tidy:

Use the labels, filters, and rules tools that Outlook has built in. This means you can label certain respondents or emails as ‘important’ or ‘unimportant’ and move them to specific folders. For example, you could set rules that only certain email addresses found in your address book are allowed into your main inbox folder. Or, use the filter tool to get rid of common spam or marketing emails automatically.

Lots of people are scared to delete emails for one reason or another, however, it will make your inbox more organised and your life a lot easier if you lose this fear. Once you’ve read your emails each day, take action on them. If you know for a fact you’re not going to contact a certain recipient or take action on the content of the email – delete it. If you’re not sure about the email – delegate it to someone who does.

If you find yourself using a lot of stock replies or short emails over and over, using an auto-responder or automatic reply system will be useful. In Outlook you can easily set up an auto-reply message for when you’re busy or out of the office. There are also excellent add-ons you can purchase or download that send automatic replies to groups of recipients to save you the hassle, such as Thunderbird Quicktext or Lifehacker Texter.

Lastly, keep things simple. Create a few specific folders for spam, personal emails, business emails, and one or two more. If you overload your inbox with folders, you’ll soon lose track of what’s where and who’s who. Simple, clean, and organised is your email goal.

Until next time, happy computing!