Welcome to Part II of my multi-part series geared towards helping small business owners get the most out of their email. This article will focus on how to keep your inbox empty so you can keep your eye on your business.
Email is a fantastic and helpful tool. An efficient means of communicating with customers and employees. The lifeblood of the modern workforce. Left unchecked your inbox can easily grow into an unwieldy beast which must be tamed.
Trouble finding relevant emails fast? You’re not doing your company any good if you spend more time hunting for email then doing work. Worse, have you realized that important emails get lost? If any of the above describe your relationship with email then here’s some tools to win the battle.
Get The Gist
- Keep from being overwhelmed by keeping your inbox empty
- Create and use folders (labels or tags depending on the email client)
- Delete
- Archive
- Utilize search instead of manually hunting
- Use filters or rules to automatically process emails as they arrive
In keeping with the Getting Things Done philosophy, the inbox is where things are captured to be processed. How do you keep your inbox empty and email organized? With four powerful tools in your arsenal: Folders (or labels or tags depending on your client), the trash, search and filters (or rules).
Folders (Labels, Categories, etc)
Most email clients offer you more options then storing emails in your inbox or in your trash. Instead you can create folders (or labels for you GMail users) in which to store emails. Use folders/labels to file things away and out of your inbox. Labels are such a powerful tool I’ll be dedicating an entire article to the topic.
Delete
The fact is we get a lot of irrelevant and useless email. Don’t be afraid to hit the delete button. No matter how funny that joke may be, it doesn’t need to live on in your inbox. File it or delete it.
Archive
“Do I Need This Email?” Can’t pull the trigger on deleting? When in doubt, archive it. In Gmail hitting the Archive button removes it from your inbox but still makes it available in search. In Outlook, create a folder called Archive instead. If you’re on the fence or deliberating with yourself whether to delete or not then archive is a great solution.
Search
Search is a great way to find past emails but only if you know what you’re looking for. And it only works if you’re searching for a specific email. It may not be well suited to finding all emails related to a project. This is where you need to strike a balance between searching for items and applying labels.
Filters and Rules
Filters for you Gmail folk and Rules for the Outlook users are a way to have your email client process emails for you. If there’s a newsletter you subscribe to create a rule to automatically apply the ToRead label and archive it move it out of your inbox. I’ll outline a few of my favorite filters in Mastering Those Email Ninja Skills.
Take some time to find these tools in your email client. In my next article we’ll be putting these tools into action to keep your inbox clean and empty.
All Things Dave 