How to clean up your Inbox

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New email keeps on coming every day. You carefully read it, file it, archive it, move it to various folders, reply to it, but it just keeps on coming. Forgetting to file one email often means leaving it “for later” and that later never really comes. Time passes and you end up accumulating tons of messages in your Inbox. And you never seem to reach your “Inbox Zero” nirvana. Does this sound familiar?

“Inbox Zero” is actually a great idea but for many, it is hard to achieve, due to just one simple thing – lack of simple habit of cleaning up.

So here are 5 ideas how to clean up your email to eventually reach empty Inbox.

1) Each day, set aside a minute or two to clean up 5-10 emails which are not needed and can be deleted. The key here is to develop a habit. It does not take much time to clean up 5-10 emails. To file them to proper folders or to simply delete them. It may seem overwhelming to see tons of messages in the Inbox and quickly give up, but the fact is that the more you clean it up, the less there will be and with time, just as they accumulated, they will be cleaned up. If you don’t know where to start – start with the oldest ones. They are most likely best candidates to be deleted.

2) Speaking of delete – do not be afraid to use delete. It might seem a good idea to file everything, archive into special folders and so on, but some things are simply not worth keeping. Do not attempt to be perfect, as that will not get you nowhere. Do you file every conversation you had with every person (in real life that is)? Of course not. So why do it with email? Many messages are simply not worth keeping once they have been read.

3) Use the rule – if it is older than 2 years, it will likely never be read again and can be deleted.

4) If you replied to it and there is nothing there to keep, delete it immediately.

5) If you really have to keep some messages, then at least remove them from Inbox. Move them to “Archive” folder or something of that sort. Leaving Inbox empty will remove visual clutter and will give you some sense of accomplishment at the end of a day.

Published by

phazze

Phazze (Zvonko Tesic) is entrepreneur, programmer, music producer and blogger.

2 thoughts on “How to clean up your Inbox”

  1. Why is OE Classic a shareware program with Free/Pro editions instead of a freeware with a single free edition? Why couldn’t you make it freeware?

  2. 10 years of development (and counting), fast and daily support replies to user requests, 2.7 million lines of code so far, and the costs of running a business (programming/design/hosting/hardware/software/utilities/taxes etc.). That is just a very brief summary of course. If you believe all that can be done for free – feel free to make one of your own and I look forward testing it in a few years when it will be decent enough (most of our users didn’t even take a look at OE Classic before it was 3 years old and even then it was far from what it is today).

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