Your tips on how to manage work/personal emails?

[thisisyoursign]

I have an okish system for managing my work emails but my personal emails are a mess with lots of junk mail.

What are your tips/strategies to manage emails?

At work, here’s what I do:

• everything coming into my inbox (approx 100+ a day) gets filed into “to do”, “follow up” or “archive/reference” - that has lots of subfolders for different projects etc. This is helpful but my to do folder is always quite long and I have things from weeks ago I still need to do.
• once I’ve actioned emails in “to do” they go into follow up (if I had to ask someone else a question) or the Archive subfolder
• I have “conversation view” turned on to group all emails in the same chain as one email which has been helpful
• I have one or two rules set up for monthly update emails.

Anyone have any golden tips they’d like to share?

I have two "folders" - my inbox and archive. Everything that's to do is added to Planner and everything is moved to archive at the end of each day. I've had multiple folders before but it's to much faff for little reward.

Every email you look at you do something with immediately. Either Do it, Defer it into some other folder, Delete it, or Delegate it to someone else. Your To Do folder might end up with things in, but your actual inbox remains really tidy.

For work emails: I use the “edit” function to give emails more meaningful subjects as I get a lot of people emailing off the back of someone else’s unrelated email.

I asked IT to set up a few distribution lists for certain kinds of internal urgent requests so these emails can be mail-ruled to a priority folder (then it’s a case of educating users or making your internal email footer show the different addresses eg “for errors in xyz system please put [email protected] in the TO line of your email”). Advantage here is also you can multiple people to triage incomingemails if you use distribution lists.

I make a point of replying late to people who don’t follow my team’s email rules and saying “unfortunately your request was lost in another emailing thread, in future for a more timely answer please make sure you send brand new requests in a separate thread, thank you.”

For home mail, once a month I sit down and unsubscribe from all the junk mail!

you need to meet:

I enjoyed that other thread too,because of course the OP is right.

My inbox isn't really good enough

That said I do have systems

• not folders other than archive
• categorise with rules where possible
• heavy use of snooze button if I ask someone to do something and am waiting for the reply
• set aside time for reading / thinking or tackling topics by category.

I ignore loads of my emails. I have hundreds of unread ones 😁 but they're all corporate newsletters/emails I'm copied on for information etc. I just carefully read my inbox every morning and go through what needs a response. I'm famed for my speedy replies, especially compared with other people in my organisation

I flag items in my inbox that I need to do something about, delete those I don’t and archive anything that might be useful in future, I have quite a few subfolders to organise the archived emails. I do exactly the same at work and in my personal inbox.

Work:
A folder for every project with filters do the emails go straight in there. Occasionally I'll do a sweep of inbox and sent for any that haven't moved to the project folder. I'll just scan each folder for emails I need to action/chase. Occasionally I'll go through and delete non-important ones (meeting invites etc) that don't need to be archived.

Inbox and sent though are still full with various other emails not project specific and I'll action/delete/unsubscribe as and when.

Home:
Similar, folders for various topics
Receipts
Holiday stuff
DC stuff
House stuff
Finance etc

Inbox and sent filled with miscellaneous stuff, every now and again I'll go through and delete those no longer relevant, leave the ones that have info I might need.

Rarely have unread emails. Unsubscribe from stuff as soon as I receive a mail I don't want.

I can’t stand having unread emails in my inbox, which is probably weird of me! I would just delete them if they were so unimportant I couldn’t even be bothered to open them!

@ShillyShallySherbet you're not alone, I'm definitely the odd one out in this regard!

I have two personal email addresses one for important things, bank, insurances, school etc one for junk mail online shopping etc. The junky one I have a folder in for receipts so if I buy something the invoice goes in there the rest I don't even read let alone delete, although every now and then I just delete all. It also means anything important is in a mailbox with little traffic which is easy to keep on top of

I prefer to categorise rather than folders. More visual and can see everything in that category.

I use folders for each project or category and move things straight in there with a task flag if I need to do something. So then I manage a task list rather than the inbox. Also lots of rules to automatically file the corporate newsletter stuff. Worth spending time each week on unsubscribing, deleting junk etc - my stress leverage lower when there are fewer messages on view!

I have folders and rules for a lot of things, eg calendar invites go automatically into a folder, because I spend 5 mins reviewing my calendar in the morning and accept/reject invites from there. Notifications from our ticketing system get auto filed, because again, I review my tickets daily anyway. Corporate 'it's bobs birthday' type emails also get filed automatically.

The rest get dealt with immediately and then filed, or flagged for follow up, and if I need to, I block time in my calendar to deal with them specifically. I leave those I haven't done in my inbox, because I find if I move them before I deal with them, I tend to forget them, even if they are flagged. So my inbox is basically a to do list, with only live issues in it. I try and go through it am and pm, and after lunch. At the moment I have about 6 items in there pending action. So it feels manageable and nothing gets lost.