How to Organise Email and Manage Your Inbox

Email is an effective business communication tool. Still, sometimes an overwhelming number of messages can pile up in your inbox. Here's how to manage your messages like a pro and organize your email inbox with Clean Email so that you can use your mailbox to its full potential.

@CantyDigital we try to keep as much as possible in Clickup with minimal emails and chats (direct messages) BUT keeping your inbox organised is VERY important so that no important emails/client requests etc are ever missed

Top Tips to Help You Organize Your Inbox Email Messages

When you want to keep your inbox from getting cluttered and becoming unusable, learn how to organize your email inbox. It's quick and easy to find the messages you need when your email inbox is organized. And it's even easier to get rid of the messages you don't need.

The goal of organizing your email inbox is to achieve Inbox Zero. Inbox Zero is when your inbox is completely empty, and your mail is dealt with as soon as it comes in. But how do you achieve this goal of Inbox Zero?

We collected the 10 best ways to organize email messages and achieve a clutter-free inbox. As a bonus, we also included information on Clean Email, an email organizer that groups inbox emails into easy-to-review bundles.

With the right strategy, diligent management of your emails, and an inbox organizer like Clean Email, you can become more proficient at your job, keep track of important events, and stay up to date with the latest news. Plus, your inbox will never contain more than a day's worth of emails.

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1. Organise Your Inbox Regularly & Often

Nobody enjoys being disturbed when working on a difficult task. Alerts and notifications from incoming emails can become annoying quickly, which is why many people turn them off and ignore new emails. That's a sensible thing to do, but don't ignore those unread emails for too long because they can accumulate and become unmanageable.

The best approach is to schedule blocks of time during the day for reading and responding to emails. The blocks don't need to be long—10 or 15 minutes is usually enough. What matters most is that you don’t skip them.

Avoid spending too much time on individual emails. Archive emails that don't require a response, respond to emails that need it, and snooze emails that you don't know how to respond to at the moment.

How to organize Gmail @CantyDigital we use GSuite (Gmail)

Knowing how to organize Gmail can make your life simpler, and you can choose from several methods to reduce the clutter in your inbox.

To help you quickly identify important messages and emails that you need to respond to, use labels. Using multiple Gmail accounts can help you separate your work emails from your personal emails. And archiving messages you want to keep for future reference can also help.

2. Use Labels and Folders

Even if you have an unlimited inbox, you should delete as many inbox email messages as possible. The fewer emails there are in your inbox, the easier it is to find a specific message when you need it. But what about the inbox emails you can't delete? Simple: learn how to organize mail using folders and labels.

Many mail clients use folders, which are like drawers, where you store emails so that they don't clutter your inbox. You can create several folders and dedicate each to specific emails, such as work-related emails, social media notifications, or emails from friends and family. Your inbox is your main folder with all your inbox emails.

Gmail is different. It doesn't use folders like other mail clients. Instead, Gmail uses labels to categorize email messages. Labels are similar to folders in that you'll find each label name in Gmail's folder navigation panel. When you select a label, you'll see all the emails with that label.

Labels are different from folders in that labels in Gmail work like post-it notes. When you assign labels to inbox emails, the emails don't actually move. That's why a single message can have many labels but be present only in one folder.

Once you know how to create folders in Gmail, you can label your messages and organize email by category.

3. Rule Them All

One thing is guaranteed when it comes to inbox email messages: new ones keep coming and coming. While you can't stop all incoming messages, you can use rules. Rules help you identify emails by sender, subject line, or recipient to automatically place them in the correct folder, assign them the proper labels, or delete them.

Email rules are also called filters, and many popular email services support them out of the box. While each service handles this task differently, learning how to filter emails in your Gmail

The only problem with email rules is that they can be challenging to set up, which is where Clean Email comes in. The app can set up rules automatically and automate email tasks like combining emails so you can clean your inbox quickly, organizing emails into groups, and automating repetitive tasks.

4. Archive Emails to Keep Your Inbox Clean

Today, email users have more options for how to organize email inbox than a decade ago. Most popular service providers and clients support archiving.

What does it mean to archive an email message? Archiving helps keep your inbox clean by hiding unimportant emails that you're not ready to delete.

For example, imagine you receive an assignment from your boss. After you complete the task, you could delete the original message. However, you wouldn’t be able to read the message in the future. By archiving the message, you make it disappear from your inbox to reduce the clutter, and you can come back to the message later if you need to.

From time to time, clean up your archived messages to free up storage space. You can either archive messages manually or configure an automatic inbox cleaner to delete messages older than 30 days.

5. Deep Clean Your Inbox from Time to Time

There's no best way to organize email inbox. If you want a clutter-free inbox, practice the email organization tips described in this article regularly, day after day. However, some unwanted or unnecessary emails will still end up in your inbox, and you should address them before they pile up and prevent you from being productive.

That’s why we recommend you deep clean your inbox occasionally. Think of inbox deep cleaning as spring cleaning for your digital life. The goal is to review your email organization strategy and check as many messages that haven't been properly organized as possible.

Since deep cleaning is a time-consuming activity, don’t do it in a hurry because you would need to do it again soon.

6. Organize Emails Using Stars and Flags

Some mail clients let you star and flag emails. Consider taking advantage of this feature as much as possible because it allows you to visually distinguish emails you want to look at later.

Here’s how to star a message in Gmail:

• Open your Gmail inbox.

• Go to the left of the message, then click the star icon.

To flag a message in Outlook.com:

• Log in to your Outlook inbox.

• Hover the mouse over the message you want to flag and click the flag icon.

Some mail clients let users set up multiple stars and flags, allowing them to differentiate emails based on specified criteria, for example, low, medium, or high urgency.

Don't get carried away with flagging and starring messages. When most of your messages are flagged or a large number have multiple stars, it can be challenging to determine which messages are important. This abundance of flags and stars is only one of the email organization mistakes to avoid.

7. Snooze Emails for Later

Sometimes, messages arrive at the wrong time. When that happens, you have two options:

• Option A: You can stop what you're doing and deal with the message.

• Option B: You can ignore the message and come back to it later.

If you choose Option A, you risk losing track of the original activity, which can cause your productivity to plummet. If you choose Option B, you risk making the sender wait for a response too long or forgetting about the message altogether.

Fortunately, there's also Option C: snoozing the message for later. Snoozing removes the snoozed message from your inbox temporarily and makes it re-appear later when you have time for it. These days, email snoozing is supported by most clients and services.

8. Use Canned Responses

Why waste valuable time writing the same responses over and over when you can save them and enter them with one click? Canned responses are beneficial if you use email for work-related purposes. And you can use them to save time when asking about the status of your online purchases, for example.

9. Unsubscribe from Unwanted Emails

Unwanted subscriptions are the main enemy of anyone who strives to achieve and maintain Inbox Zero. From newsletters to advertisements, they can quickly overwhelm your inbox and make it difficult to spot important messages. Marketers have learned to write newsletters and advertisements as if they were coming from a friend or acquaintance, making it more difficult to spot them and get rid of them.

When you want to bypass those situations, email management tools can help you automatically unsubscribe from emails, unwanted newsletters, advertisements, and other unwanted mailings.