How To Deal With Tons Of E-Mail Clutter On Your Computer

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Email is a great way to stay in contact with friends and family and most importantly, it’s become an essential part of doing business in today’s economy.

Since email is so easy to use, it’s easy to find yourself overwhelmed with the number of email messages you receive each day.

I know for me I sometime receive a couple of hundred emails a day which is why I’m writing on this subject!

This clutter can eventually become a source of stress because missed messages or important communication gets lost in the wash!

But I’m quickly learning that if  I become more proactive in addressing my email clutter, I’ll be able to reduce this stress to a minimum and guess what?

You can do the same too!

We all want to spend less time dealing with our emails so that we can make time for the really important things on our daily agenda.

So I’ve done some research and below I’ve listed a few steps that you can take to assist in your email clean-up.

Prevent Unwanted And Unsolicited Emails 

Major email service providers such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail have gotten very good at identifying and filtering spam email, but you can help them get better.

For example, if you’re a Gmail user like I am then all you have to do is click the “Report Spam” button to identify any spam messages that you happen to receive.

 

If you’re using Hotmail, all you have to do is click on the “Junk” button.

When enough users identify a certain sender’s messages as being junk or spam, then the service will be able to better filter future message from that sender.

Prioritize Your Incoming Emails

One way to reduce future clutter in your inbox is to have a system that can help you prioritize new emails as you receive them.

If you can deal with the important emails right away and leave the low priority emails until later, then your inbox won’t get cluttered quite as quickly.

Most email providers give you the ability to create rules or filters by which you can identify emails which come from certain people as being the most important.

If you use Gmail, consider giving Gmail’s “Priority Inbox” a try if you haven’t already.

This feature does a great job at automatically highlighting the emails you’re likely to find most important.

Purge What You No Longer Need

Another key element of the decluttering strategy is to identify the emails you absolutely must keep.

If you’ve already acted on the email but still need to keep it, then get it out of your inbox and into a storage folder or archive.

Determine why you must keep them and if you don’t really need to keep the email, simply delete it.

Finally, one of the most important things you can do is identify those emails that you can address in a few minutes or less.

Once you identify those emails, take the necessary action IMMEDIATELY so that you can be done with it, and then delete the email.

Simply leaving these emails and telling yourself you’ll “deal with them later” only leads to more clutter. Trust me – I know!

I hope you’ve found this information to be helpful and if so I’d love to hear from you! Please let me know what is the one tip you received from this post that you think will help you in your business the most by sharing your thoughts in the comments section below.

If you have any additional questions about starting your business or need assistance with expanding or marketing your business, please feel free leave me a comment or post it on my Facebook Page and I’ll try to assist you in any way I can!

Have an awesome day!

Pam Lawhorne

Tagged as: business ideas, business planning, change, communication, email, emailing, gmail, hotmail, marketing strategy, project management, self improvement, success strategies, technology, time management, yahoo