How To Manage Your Email Inbox

I don’t know about you, but it seems like for every email I delete, I receive at least three more. 

As a virtual assistant, one of our responsibilities is to ensure the smooth operation of business administration for our clients. After dealing with a lot of clients, I know many small business owners experience feeling overwhelmed when it comes to managing their email inbox. 

This is why we implemented an inbox management system that I would like to share with you. 

At Prime Personal Assistant, whenever we check business emails or when providing email management services to our clients, we always take one of the following actions: 

• Reply, 
• Delete, 
• Save / Star / Flagged  
• Move to ‘reply later folder, 
• Unsubscribe / Spam

Doing this ensures that your inbox will remain, for the most part, empty.

Depending on how many emails you already have in your inbox, this might seem like an impossible task. But don’t forget there are easy ways to manage your inbox in bulk, which makes the process much faster and less boring. 

How to manage your inbox

FOLLOW THE SIMPLE RULES BELOW TO MANAGE YOUR INBOX

Creating a folder allows you to easily organise your emails 

If you are using Gmail, they don’t have folders; instead, you can create a ‘label’ which you can use to organise your emails. 

How to manage your inbox

FOLLOW THE SIMPLE RULES BELOW TO MANAGE YOUR INBOX

Creating a folder allows you to easily organise your emails 

If you are using Gmail, they don’t have folders; instead, you can create a ‘label’ which you can use to organise your emails. 

STEP 1 

Create a folder / label called ‘Reply later’

This folder is where you will store all emails that you receive. When you receive an email which you are unable to respond to immediately, but requires a response or action from you later, move it to the ‘reply later’ folder. 

• If you are using Gmail, you can find instructions on how to create a label here.

• If you are using Outlook you can find instructions on how to create a folder in your Outlook email account here. 

STEP 2 

Create a folder / label called ‘Saved’

This folder is where you will store important emails that you want to save. 

When you receive an important email that you want to save, move it to the ‘saved’ folder. 

STEP 3 

Take action – email management

Every single time you visit your inbox, read your email and do at least one of the following:

• If you need to respond to the email, respond immediately if you can 

• If you need to respond to the email, but can’t do it immediately, move it to the ‘reply later’ folder 

• If you don’t need to save the email and don’t need to respond, delete it immediately

• If you want to save the email, move it to the ‘saved’ folder.  

• If it is unwanted email or spam, unsubscribe from their mailing list if the option is given and mark it as spam immediately. 

Whenever you read a new email, never leave it in your inbox; make sure to always do one of the 5 actions listed above. 

This email management system is the same method we use to manage our emails and also to manage our clients’ emails. 

This simple inbox system is enough to get you started and organised with your email management. To learn more ways to improve your email management, explore some other ways you can organise and manage your email.

Additional Tips for better email management.

Create rules. 

Create rules for certain emails. By setting up rules in advance, you can tell your email client how you want it to behave whenever you receive certain emails. This way, you no longer need to manually move emails into folders; you can create a rule for specific emails to automatically be moved into a folder. 

Templates

This one is huge. This is a must, especially if you regularly send the same email responses. Creating templates will help you to reply to emails faster. It will help the process not seem so repetitive, as you don’t have to type out the same information over and over again. The template can be used as a starting point and can also be edited to send customised emails to your contacts. 

Set a reminder for replies. 

The last thing that you want to do is forget about the emails you have added to ‘ Reply later’. If you have been following our system and have cleared your inbox, then it may not be as obvious when you log into your inbox that you have emails sitting in the ‘reply later’ folder that require your attention. I recommend setting a reminder to handle your email replies using a task management app so that you don’t forget. Instead of creating separate tasks for each email, it’s more efficient to schedule a dedicated block of time in your project or task management tool to respond to all emails at once. This approach helps you stay organised and saves time. 

Clear drafts

Delete draft emails that you no longer need or that are taking up space. 

Sent

At Prime Personal Assistant, we like to keep our sent items for a period of time before deleting them in case we need to refer back to them for a reason. We have a specific amount of time we keep sent emails before we delete them. 

Clear deleted emails

Depending on the settings of your email account, you may need to manually delete the emails within your deleted emails folder. A lot of email providers nowadays will automatically delete deleted emails for you after a specific number of days, which usually varies between 30 and 90 days. 

This means if you accidentally delete an email and don’t recover it from the deleted emails folder, after 90 days, the email will be permanently deleted and lost forever. So keep an eye on your deleted items every once in a while to ensure that any emails haven’t been moved there by mistake.

Spam 

Delete emails from your spam folder. You should also ensure you hit the unsubscribe button to prevent receiving any further communication in the future. Most of the time, when you receive an email from a business, there is an option to opt out or unsubscribe from their mailing list. However, with spammers, sometimes even after opting out, you will still continue to receive emails from them. As long as you have marked it as spam, incoming emails from that email address will be filtered and marked as spam. The spam email will automatically be moved to the spam folder. This will prevent you from accidentally opening any dodgy emails and potentially being attacked with a computer virus or malicious spyware. 

 ASSIST

• A virtual assistant can clear your inbox for you 

Click here to find out more.