Enjoying the sunshine? Feeling a little more productive than usual due to the beautiful weather? Don’t stop at just spring cleaning your house or office, your G Mail Inbox probably needs some love too. If you’re put on edge by seeing “4,000 unread messages”, what better day to cleanse your inbox than today?
Five tips to control your inbox instead of it controlling you:
1. Getting Your Inbox to Zero
Yes, it sounds like a daunting task, but today, you’re in control. It’s time to adopt the philosophy of maintaining a clean inbox. The plan is to have ZERO messages in your inbox. To execute Operation Inbox Zero, you can either address an email immediately or, if you don’t have the luxury of time, file it away for later in the day, but add it to your task list to finish the day strong.
2. Befriending G Mail Archive. It’s Always There for You
G Mail offers gigabytes of storage, which is way more than you’ll EVER use. For now, forget about the delete button. Archive them instead! It’s like faux deletion. An email will leave your inbox, but will be kept in your “All Mail”, keeping them forever just in case you need to search for something….which you more than likely will.
3. Tags and Filters For The Win
Usually when we visit a website, it is very likely they will ask for contact information- spam that you actually signed up for so services can send you countless newsletters and sales that you will likely never read or even care about reading. You can filter or tag these for later reading so they don’t clog up your inbox. Again.. today, you’re in control.
You can also tag messages, kind of like putting them in specific folders called “tabs” in Gmail except a message can have multiple tags at once!. In Gmail, tagged messages go into virtual folders, but tagging is also useful for finding messages later by just clicking on a particular tab in the sidebar, or searching for it in the advanced search bar in you G Mail App.
4. Unsubscribe….In Bulk
Okay to be real, you are 100% on the receiving end of emails you DID NOT sign up for that aren’t getting caught by G Mail’s spam filter, just because you checked into a location once or twice. Tools like Unroll.Me plug in to your email account and offer you an easy unsubscribe from all the unwanted garbage emails you get every day.
5. Use More Than One Inbox (When You Can)
Instead of folders, tags and filters, you can have different inboxes for different purposes. The old saying “never mix business with pleasure” applies to your email as well. Gmail supports this feature and with it’s intelligence, creates inboxes for your personal items, newsletters and subscriptions!
