Take Charge of Your Email Inbox

Guest blog writer, Bonnie Shay, one of the featured speakers at our upcoming breakfast workshop, Soft Skill Development for the Women Business Leader to be held on August 27th 

Take Charge of Your Email Inbox

Email has become a full-time challenge to manage, both personally and professionally. People have become inundated with the quantity of emails that find their way into their inboxes, and before they know it, 3,000 emails have taken up residence there. As a result, they become overwhelmed, stuck, and don’t know what to do. Are you one of these people?

How would you feel …

• If your inbox had less than one screen’s worth of email in it?
• If you could find any email you were looking for in a few seconds?
• If you didn’t miss important items because they weren’t buried in your inbox with 2,999 other emails?
• If you felt peaceful and calm because you had regained control of your email?

This is all possible and it can be your reality if you want. 

How did our inboxes get to be overflowing?

• We get more and more emails each day.
• We fear deleting something because we think we might need it someday.
• We fear missing out on something good.
• We don’t make decisions or we don’t make good decisions.
• We have multiple email addresses and multiple devices to manage.
• We are inundated with many modes of communication and infinite distractions.

How to un-clutter your inbox and make it work for you.

Inbox goal: Your inbox should only contain those emails that are truly important and need your attention.

Consider an overflowing inbox as a collection of decisions not made. Either you don’t take the time to decide where the email needs to go or you don’t know where it needs to go. Vow to make decisions about where emails should go so that your inbox remains uncluttered. Here are a few suggestions:

• Unsubscribe from emails that are no longer relevant to your life. 
• Automatically divert emails that you don’t need to see immediately to appropriate folders for later reading.
• Delete emails you don’t really need to keep.
• File emails that you need for future reference in appropriate folders.
• Act on emails that need your attention and then delete or file the email.

It is all about making decisions and being determined to maintain an uncluttered inbox so that email once again becomes a tool to work for you instead of being a full time job in and of itself. You can do it!