How often does your phone ping to tell you that an email has arrived and you groan inwardly?

How often do you look at your screen and see how many unread emails are waiting for you and your heart sinks?

How often do you open your email inbox and start deleting messages without even opening them?

Let’s get it sorted together today.

Again, you need to arm yourself with a cup of coffee and your internet device. Open your inbox and carry out the following actions:

1. Rather than deleting emails that you don’t need to receive, e.g. marketing, open them and click on ‘unsubscribe’ and they won’t bother you again. I did this and I went from receiving about 70 emails a day down to about 5 – result!

2. Any emails that contain ‘old’ or ‘out-of-date’ information can be deleted.

3. Any emails that need a reply – do it now.

4. Emails that have items that you want to save, e.g. photos, set up a folder in ‘documents’ and save the email in there or save the picture files to ‘photos’. After saving you can delete the original email from your inbox.

Once you’ve done this it’s easy to stay on top of your inbox if you keep following these steps you’ll notice that it never builds up. I’ve also turned off my email notifications on my phone; it stops me from feeling bad if I don’t immediately check them and it means I only check them when I’ve actually got time to deal with them.

For those of you who’ve been inspired to conquer your inbox, either today or in the past, how did it go? How do you feel now that you’ve done it? Add your comments below.

Come back tomorrow for your next nudge into productivity.

Photo credit: Freepik