Are you an inbox 0 or a 20,000+ unread emails kind of person?

If your inbox is full of dread, then it’s time to do a big clean and make it work for you. You don’t have to be an inbox zero person, but your email inbox shouldn’t be so scary – in fact, it should be helping you to be more productive!

Today, I’ll show you my system for keeping my emails under control.

🗑️ Clear out all your old emails.

If you’ve been ignoring your emails for years, this may take a while, but it’s an important step! First off, archive everything. (Don’t delete – archiving means you can still search for stuff later.) This will take a while if you have a lot of emails, but it’s necessary to give yourself a clean slate.

🚀 Take action.

Now when you get new emails, it’ll be easier to take action immediately because you’re not overwhelmed by clutter. When you get an email, you can:

1. Archive it: if it’s worth keeping but you don’t need to do anything, archive it.

2. Unsubscribe from it: if it’s something you never read and don’t care about, unsubscribe.

3. Keep it: if you have to take action, keep it in your inbox until the action is complete.

“Action” could be a lot of things: replying, paying bills, or even just read later. The important thing to remember is that the inbox is for things that need action, so when the action is complete, you archive it.

📂 Commit to some key labels/folders.

I’m personally not a fan of having folders for everything since I usually just search, but it’s important to make folders for anything you might forget about. For example, I always have a folder for the financial year that all my receipts go into – when tax time rolls around, there’s no way I would remember what I bought last August.

📌 Flag or pin stuff that you need in the long-term.

There are some things that need your attention but are far in the future: concert tickets, flight details, or other events that you definitely need the email for, but you don’t need it sitting in your inbox for months. For these emails, I just flag/pin them until I need them.

These habits will take a while to build, but if you focus actively on keeping your inbox under control it’ll become second nature before you know it. Practicing these for many years now means I’m never, ever stressed opening my emails – pretty worth it!