Now that you know your Organizing Style, putting together your plan of attack should be relatively easy. But before we get to the fun part of cleaning it out let’s see where you are at right now. How many emails do you have in your inbox at this very moment?
In this next series, we are going to give you some suggestions for how you can clean out that monstrous inbox of yours and MAINTAIN it! Regardless of what your email situation is, we all have things we love and hate about our inbox. Think about your current situation and I want you to write down what you absolutely hate about your inbox. Those are the things you want to concentrate on changing. As you find new solutions or ideas of your own, be sure and write them down.
I don’t know about you, but I distinctly remember that our Math book in high school had the answers to all of the odd numbered questions in the back of the book. I would be completely lying to you if I swore that I did NOT look at the answers, so let’s face it, I’m a cheater and like I did back in high school I am going to cheat again!
For right now we are going to cheat with our inbox. Sometimes it’s about shoving everything underneath your bed and tackling the nightmare when you are in a better frame of mind. So that is what we are going to do!
Go ahead and create a new folder in your inbox and label it, “Inbox September 08”. Next, move all of your emails into the new folder. Voila! Your inbox is clean and you are all done! KIDDING!
The good part about taking this step is you do get to start with a clean slate, however, it does not mean you don’t have to do something with all of those emails. The quickest way of getting rid of obsolete emails is to Archive. Archiving is wonderful in that you determine how far back you want to leave those old emails in your inbox. The standard time frame is about 90 days, but you can change it to reflect whatever makes you most comfortable. I personally have mine set to 30-days. If you haven’t already set up your Auto Archive feature, go ahead and do it. It will amaze you how many emails will magically disappear from your inbox.
I personally like sorting through all of my emails and deleting all of the crap. That means jokes, witty banter back and forth from my friends, updates from Plaxo, notifications from Facebook, etc. This is all senseless garbage. So I start by sorting my emails by the sender. I can quickly delete every email sent to me by Dan, eliminate all of the updates from social networking sites, and I have just deleted over 200 emails in the matter of moments. How amazing is that?!
The next part is a bit more time consuming, but just as liberating! A lot of email programs have an option of sorting by Conversation. What this does is actually put together email strings. So if you and a colleague have sent 10 emails back and forth on one email string, it will group all of those emails or Conversations together and you can delete all but the most current email. There is no need to keep 9 other emails when you have the entire conversation all in one email! With a simple click on Delete you have just further cleaned out your inbox.
Now that we have all had the wonderful pleasure of deleting all of the memory sucking emails, let’s go ahead and figure out what to do with the emails that are left.
Before we get started though, you need to remember what Organizing Style you are. Are you Visual, Logical or Inspirational? This is going to play a huge part on what steps you are going to need to take to clean out your inbox further.
Steps to Take
1. Create new folder – “Inbox Month Year”
2. Move all emails from inbox to temp folder
3. Auto Archive
4. Clean out the crap
5. Delete by conversation
If you are among the blessed Inspirational organizers, we are going to start with you since you will be the easiest. Stayed tuned to tomorrow's blog post to find out HOW to best keep your inbox clean.
Happy Organizing!
Suzanne
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