1. Stop sending so many emails
Sometimes it is much better to handle something in person or on the phone than to use email. You must learn to recognize such situations, otherwise you may find yourself buried under the responses to your emails. Generally, email is excellent for communicating well-formulated messages that require, at most, a simple confirmation. It is much less suitable for extended group conversations in which several participants share their thoughts with each other.
2. Start reading your emails regularly
We know the last thing you want to do before or after work is read work-related emails, but that’s the way it should be if you want to become an efficient email organizer. Depending on the number of emails you receive each day, it may take only a couple of days or even hours for your inbox to start filling up with new and unread emails. By reading your emails regularly, you ensure that the situation never gets out of control.
3. Start checking your emails throughout the day
There is no excuse not to have a smartphone these days. Regardless of which email service you use, there is a way to make it work on all major mobile operating systems. Having your email on the phone allows you to easily read new emails throughout the day, which can dramatically reduce the length of your scheduled email reading sessions, the importance of which we described in the previous chapter.
4. Start using an email client
Web-based email services are great because you can access them comfortably from anywhere, even when you’re away from your own personal computer. But even the best web-based user interface can’t compete with the features and convenience of dedicated email clients like Outlook or Mailbird. Email clients are faster, can display emails from multiple email services in a single window, support keyboard shortcuts, have powerful spell checking features, and are available for all operating systems and devices.
We have already mentioned Outlook and Mailbird, which are arguably the most popular email clients for Windows, but there is also Airmail, an email client for iPhone and macOS from Italian company Bloop SRL, Postbox, a desktop email client and feed reader for Windows and macOS written and sold by Postbox, Inc., or Mozilla Thunderbird, a free and open source cross-platform email client developed by the Mozilla Foundation, just to name a few available options.
5. Stop subscribing to newsletters
Websites and businesses love email newsletters because they allow them to stay engaged and sell products with minimal effort. While some newsletters are clearly valuable, most sooner or later end up being ignored. You may think that subscribing to a newsletter is no big deal; after all, you can always drop out later, but experience tells us that things tend to get unmanageable much faster than they initially seem. As a general rule, we recommend that you stop subscribing to all newsletters and use other communication channels to receive information from websites and companies, such as social networks or RSS.
6. Start using multiple mailboxes
Why have a single mailbox for everything when you can have several and use a different one for each of the things you do? You can start, for example, with a mailbox for work-related emails and a mailbox for personal emails. Some people like to go the extra mile and use a privacy-oriented email service like ProtonMail for potentially sensitive personal communications and a free and convenient email service like Gmail for web services and online shopping. Another advantage of this approach comes in the form of increased security. Having some degree of separation between various activities minimizes the impact of an email breach and gives malicious hackers less information to work with.