How to Manage Your Overflowing Inbox (9 Practical Tips)

Do you have thousands of messages with about a few hundred unread ones lurking in your email?

Now, if you only have one email address that you use for both personal and business, it can get crazy. Imagine customer inquiries, feedback, support, meeting notifications, supplier correspondence, plus your social media notifications and online subscriptions all pouring into your inbox daily. All of these and more are connected to your email.

When you’re doing business in this age of technology, having an email is a must. It’s a very useful communication tool and allows you as a solopreneur to run your business everywhere.

Related: How to Stay on Top of Your Emails

But how do you get rid of the clutter?

There may be better ways to manage your inbox, but I want to share with you some tips on how I manage mine.

1. Set aside a time to read your email

Set aside a specific time to go through your inbox. Be it an hour or two first thing in the morning, midday, before the end of business hours or maybe even 10 minutes for every hour that you work. You may also set up an auto-responder that informs the sender that you’ll be responding to emails at so and so time and that if it’s urgent, they can contact you via phone.

2. Take action as soon as you read it

How many times have you read an email and said: “I’ll come back to it later”?

Raise your hand if you’re guilty of this!

Don’t get into the habit of waiting for later. If you can act on it now, then do so. If it can’t be helped because the action to the email will be time-consuming, hit the star so it goes to the “starred” folder. You can easily look it up this way.

3. Organize your inbox

Emails usually have ways to organize your inbox by adding categories and labels. I love doing this! You can organize your messages into meetings, supplier, proposals, and the like. Note the important ones, make the label and move the items there.

4. Divide your inbox

Some email programs can divide your inbox. If you have this, use it to your advantage. You can separate external and internal emails and those that you’re only CC’d on so it’s easier to prioritize.

5. Set up automation

It’s the 21st century! Technology is here to make things easier for us. There are several email automation programs that you can use. If you’re answering the same questions, which happens every so often with customer inquiries or feedback, automation will save you a lot of time.

6. Don’t just ask. Suggest.

Don’t reply with open-ended questions. This is also a huge time saver. If you’re asking where and what time you’ll meet. The recipient will reply with this place and this time, only to find out that you’re not available at that time. Suggest your first response. Say “Can we meet at this place at this time?” So the other person can reply with a yes or no and suggest too, instead of going back and forth.

7. Short and sweet

For us, it will mostly be business. We don’t need to send extremely long emails. Long emails get responded with long emails too. So if you want to save time, make your message short and straight to the point.

8. Delete the unimportant

This is fairly simple. It’s not important, delete it. Don’t let it stay in your inbox and add to the clutter.

9. Click the unsubscribe button

Admit it. You have a lot of newsletters and email notifications that you don’t read. If you have already made a habit of deleting unimportant messages, make unsubscribing a habit. Deleting them won’t stop the messages from coming in, so remember to click the unsubscribe button too.

What about you? Do you have other ways on how you manage your inbox?