“I should just delete this email account and start over with a new one.” People say this to me all the time, but this is a really bad idea. It’s like saying that you’re going to move because your bathroom is dirty. Starting fresh makes no sense if you’ll just make the same mess somewhere else. Don’t blow up your email from frustration. Rehabilitate your email by learning to manage it better. It doesn’t take that long, and it’ll make your life so much easier and…dare I say it?… organized. Below are all the steps you need to manage your email better.
This time of the year, when holiday sales are in full swing and marketers send multiple emails a day to get your attention, you need these strategies to keep your email working well…and keep you sane.
Don’t Blow Up Your Email from Frustration (Do this Instead)
tl:dr (too long; didn’t read)
Only worry about unread emails, not how many emails you are storing. Spend 5 minutes a day for 30 days unsubscribing so you only receive emails that matter. Consolidate all of your email accounts in one easy-to-access email reader (preferably Outlook, Gmail, or AppleMail). Get help with email rehabilitation from HeartWork Organizing. Schedule your appointments now for email rehabilitation starting the first of the year.
Looking for a class to fix your email situation? We’ve got you covered. Registration is now open for The Email Cure and Digital Solutions Class. Click to secure your spot for the February 2025 class.
Reset your email expectations.
Email isn’t a game you can win. You just can’t. While you are clearing out the inbox, more gets dumped in the pile. Rather than thinking of it as something to “finish,” think of email as something to maintain, just like you brush your teeth every day, even though you might eat right afterwards.
Inbox zero is an unnecessary stressor…and not the goal!
Don’t try to keep an empty inbox. I don’t know many people who can do that, and I don’t want you feeling like a failure. But you CAN keep UNREAD emails at or near zero. It might take a few days to delete or read your backlog, but it’s doable to get to a fresh start in your current inbox.
The 50,000 emails in your inbox don’t matter one bit…if they are marked as read! You can have twice that and still feel organized. But just 10 unread emails can lead to missed commitments, late fees, and bad outcomes. Spend your time getting unread emails under control, and ignore the old ones you’ve already read.
That means you can’t keep cheating and marking emails as unread just because you want to read them again someday. You know what they say…someday isn’t a day on the calendar.
No, you can’t just abandon or ignore email.
Yes, you do need to learn to use email. You can’t just tell people you don’t read email because it’s too overwhelming. Email is how adults communicate and take care of life. Imagine telling someone that you just ignore your postal mailbox because you get too many paper bills. That wouldn’t fly, either.
I’m watching my teens learn to use email as they apply to colleges and jobs. There is a misperception that young people get along without email, but that’s not true. Email remains vital to a successful adult life. You need to learn to use email, and you’ve got to read your emails daily.
Texting won’t solve your email problem.
Texting isn’t solving your email problem. It’s just replicating it. You feel like texting is “faster,” but it’s really just jumping the line. During the last election season, didn’t it seem like you were getting as many texts as emails? When everyone from your doctor to random marketers are texting you, suddenly that feels overwhelming, too. You probably feel like messages are coming at you from all directions because, well, they are!
You probably don’t need to file your email. Yay!
Stop filing your incoming mail (or worrying about not filing it) if that feels overwhelming. Because today’s search tools are very good, you can usually search for and find what you need in a few clicks.
Check ALL of your email in one place.
What if you only had one email address? Would that feel easier than keeping up with three or four or more emails that you’ve set up over the years? You don’t need to delete or close your multiple email accounts! But you can have all of your email accounts funnel into one email reader so you can view all of your email at once in a single inbox. One place to log in. One place to read. Easy to identify as separate when needed.
Simplify your life. Pick one major set of apps and stick with them. You don’t have to change your email address to do this, as you can direct your email over to where you want to read it. Choose one set of tools:
- Microsoft (Outlook mail, calendar, contacts and task list), or
- Google calendar and gmail, or
- Apple mail, iCal, Reminders, and iContacts.
Yes, you can send your gmail to Outlook, or check your Comcast email right in your AppleMail. Not sure how? Google it, or reach out to us for help. You can even keep your ancient AOL address and read it in a modern email program with all the features I’ve described here. To forward your AOL address, you must do one extra thing to create and manage third party passwords on AOL mail, but now you have the help you need with this linked article.
I have three email addresses/accounts going into my Outlook: my company email (which is the one you all know), along with my gmail and my AT&T email that I’ve had for over 30 years. Protonmail is the only one I currently don’t have filtering into Outlook since they require a third-party app to connect.
Worst email advice (that you probably fell for)
Probably the worst email advice ever was to set up a “junk” email address, then give that address out to marketers, and never check it. That was standard advice for many years. Probably you, like so many others, learned that sometimes things that didn’t seem important at first ended up being important, and now you’ve got important things going to the “junk” email address so you have to check that, too. Stressful!
When separate email addresses make sense.
What does work, though, is having separate emails for certain specific projects or job titles. Best advice we got recently was to set up a specific email address for college applications that both my kid and I agree to access. She primarily uses it, but I can log in, too. Once we are through the college application process, we can shut it down entirely.
I’m in a few organizations, and we have addresses like president@myorganization.org. When a new person takes over that role, they also transfer that email, and the former owner transitions off that email account. So lovely!
Dramatically reduce the amount of email with this one email tool.
It’s clear that some emails are super important. It’s clear what is junk. But the stuff in the middle is really the problem. You want to get deals and coupons from your favorite stores. You want to learn from and stay in touch with people like me. But how do you avoid getting overwhelmed by the emails that aren’t important right now?
Use the OTHER inbox tab. I wrote about my love for the Outlook OTHER inbox a while ago, and it has completely changed my life, no joke. The OTHER portion of my Outlook inbox is simply another tab accessed with a single click. (Click on that link above to see how and where you access the OTHER tab in Outlook.) All my newsletters, retail emails, and special offers are filtered into the OTHER section of my inbox where I give them a quick glance and a super quick delete every other day or so. I usually delete at least fifty or one hundred emails in under a minute. They are not junk so they don’t belong in the junk mail. Google’s equivalent of Outlook’s OTHER inbox are the Primary and Promotions tabs; you can take control of what lands in these different tabs by clicking on the three dots for any given email. This is AI finally doing something really useful for you!
Don’t make this cardinal mistake with email!
Give out your (employer’s) work email to work contacts and use personal emails with your personal contacts. If the contact is someone you’d want to keep in touch with even if you weren’t employed at your current job, then give them your personal email address. One of the saddest and worst things I’ve had to do is to watch someone feverishly trying to export decades of email from their company email account when they have only days or hours left at their job. It’s not pretty.
(Also, there are ways to bulk export contact lists and emails. Don’t try to do that manually.)
Generic versus custom domain email addresses
If you own a company or are using your own vanity email address, the part on the right side of the @ sign will be something you choose. Our company email ends in @HeartWorkOrg.com.
You can move your custom domain email to route wherever you want. If you own a custom domain, you can send your email directly through gmail even if it doesn’t end in gmail.com. You can send your email directly through Outlook. You can send mail directly to Apple app on your Mac and iPhone, even if it’s a custom domain. You only have to set it up one time, and then it works a LOT better than having to go through a browser to get your email. Call your email provider to get help with this, as it’s not something the average bear knows how to do, even if they have the domain @AverageBear.com.
You can get less email in your current email boxes. A lot less! Here’s how.
- Don’t give out your email to just anyone. Just. Say. No.
- Regularly hit unsubscribe. It may seem like a pain in your busy day, but you only unsubscribe once to save so much future nuisance mail. No, hitting unsubscribe on legitimate emails does not create more spam, despite what you’ve heard.
- Sometimes when you unsubscribe, you’ll get an option to get less frequent email from that sender. Getting one a month, or just on a particular topic, can be a lot better than getting daily emails.
- Amp up your email service spam filters. Google the settings: “how to adjust spam filters on (my email provider).” Hint: your email provider is usually the last half of your email address.
- Turn off social media alerts, if you get them. It might take a minute to find the settings on Facebook, Instagram, and others, but you probably don’t need to get email reminders to check those sites.
Don’t subscribe to an email “cleaning” service.
A few of those services that propose to unsubscribe for you, or similar, are actually mining your data and selling it. Guess what that causes? More email. Sigh. Don’t pay to get scammed.
How long will it take to rehabilitate your email inbox?
We’ve worked with many different clients to “clean up” their email.
The quickest way to rehabilitate your inbox is to hit the button to filter all unread email. You’ve probably never noticed the filter option, but it’s right there on the screen. Then click the button to convert them all to “read,” and start fresh. It takes the weight off and lets you start from today to concentrate on just the unread emails.
Then, set yourself a 5, 10, or 15-minute timer for the next 30 days. Spend that amount of time just unsubscribing from emails you never read. Working on this for just 30 days will make a HUGE impact in reducing the amount of email you get day over day. You could reduce your incoming volume by 50% or more, no kidding.
Going forward, figure out how much time it takes you to at least read your new mail every day. Do not leave mail marked as unread in order to use it as a to-do list. That will feel double-bad (is that a word?) because you’ll have email building up AND you’ll have undone tasks. Instead, assign those tasks to a to-do list OR time block them on your calendar. (You can do either of these with a simple drop-and-drag in Outlook. This is why I love Outlook so much, folks.)
Need help rehabilitating your email inboxes?
If you are still reading, it’s because you need help with email, and you know it.
Lucky for you, my team and I LOVE helping people rehab their relationship with email.
Get in touch to schedule your email rehabilitation. Now accepting new email rehabilitation clients for January and February. Start your year off right. You and I will start with four scheduled 1-hour virtual appointments. We’ll do the steps I’ve outlined above, and you’ll be able to see amount of email that you are receiving on a daily basis dramatically decrease week after week. Also decrease the amount of old emails saved, too, if that’s your goal. Click here to request your appointments.
Prefer a class to fix your email? Registration is now open for The Email Cure and Digital Solutions Class. Click to secure your spot.
