Master Email Management: 8 Proven Strategies to Declutter Your Inbox

You are likely to check your emails when you start working. Like many professionals, you also likely do this about 15 times daily. But even after dedicating that much time to clear your inbox, you still have notifications, unread emails, and a general mess. The resultant effect of this is Email anxiety.

Email anxiety is your overwhelming fear of opening up and looking through your inbox. To make things worse, email anxiety is paired with an inability to stay away from it. Widely popular amongst busy professionals, email anxiety has become mainstream enough to cause widespread concerns.

The solution to this problem lies in several tried and trusted email management strategies. This article will help you understand email management best practices and their role in keeping your inbox clean and permanently rid you of email anxiety. Let's get into them one after the other.

Why do you need email management strategies?

Before we go into the tried and trusted email management tips, it is essential first to understand why your inbox gets messy. Why is it constantly overflowing with emails, and you can't seem to lay a finger on it? Here’s a list of some of the reasons you consistently get a cluttered inbox:

Too many emails: According to Statista, the number of emails sent out globally in 2022 came up to 333 billion. That's a huge number, but it doesn't end there. The report also predicted that by 026, this number would increase to 392.5 billion emails. This shows how integral emails are to businesses worldwide and spotlights the sheer number of emails an individual could receive from this global pool, leading to the next problem.

Procrastination: The average professional will likely receive up to 121 emails daily, most of which don't need a reply. Unsurprisingly, most people, including you, often choose not to open their emails until later. Prioritizing opening emails that require a reply seems like the right thing to do at that moment. Still, in retrospect, it only causes a clutter of unread emails, leaving you in danger of missing important emails.

No organization: Inboxes without an organizational system for sorting emails are undoubtedly inviting clutter. Your inbox will look like a lump of emails, and you will have no way of knowing which belongs to which category. If this is allowed to fester, it will take up valuable minutes of your work time and contribute to decision paralysis.

Unnecessary subscriptions to newsletters: You probably subscribed to all those newsletters for a reason, but there's a chance that most of them have outlived their purpose, or you're no longer in that particular phase of your career. They're just a big part of the ruins and debris in your inbox. Instead of helping you be more productive, they're taking away from your productive hours.

8 Email management best practices to boost your productivity

With the proper email management techniques, you can overpower the accumulated effects of these practices over time:

1. Turn off notifications and work offline

As this article already states, the average professional receives 121 emails daily and checks their inbox 15 times daily. It's no wonder this is contributing to productivity issues.

It's just like social media. You open your app to do one thing, and you get stuck there longer than you imagined. Similarly, each time you open your inbox to check your emails, you take valuable time off your immediate deliverables to do something that could take longer than planned.

Essentially, the messier your inbox is, the more time it takes to sift through emails to find what you're looking for. You're not going to get a trophy for attending to an email as soon as it drops in your inbox, so the best email management practice is to turn off your notifications and save yourself from unnecessary distractions.

2. Have a schedule for opening emails per day

You may want to ask, “What if I miss out on important emails while my notifications are turned off or as I work offline?” That's a good question. Turning off your notifications and working offline does not necessarily mean you get to ignore your emails for the entire day.

Applying email management best practices tolin involves creating a workable schedule for checking your emails and doing so in a way that will not stress you or decrease your productivity levels.

A study conducted by Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth W. Dunn established the relationship between stress and emails. Their study concluded that participants who checked their emails just three times a day reported less stress levels than those who checked their emails more than three times.

Instead of constantly checking your inbox for new emails and taking the focus off your main deliverables, limit it to three times and do it at strategic periods of your work hours.

The first check could be at resumption to give you an idea of what you must work on for the day. You can schedule the next one just before lunch break so you know what to do after lunch. Finally, the last check should be just before the close of the day to see if there's anything you need to cross off before logging off for the day.

Also, set considerable time limits to ensure you don't get stuck checking your emails. This will help you prioritize which emails you need to respond to.

3. Set Priorities

Even if you receive 200 emails in one day, not all deserve the same attention and urgency. Marketing newsletters and emails from customers, employees, or business partners should be treated differently.

Put a system that lets you sort and attend to the most pressing emails, archive those you plan to read later, and delete what's unnecessary.

One system that helps you do this is the Eisenhower Matrix. The Eisenhower Matrix is a system made popular by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States between 1953 and 1961. This system helps you prioritize tasks in order of urgency and importance, filtering out the tasks you need to delegate or completely overlook. You can learn more about it in this video, but these are the fundamentals:

• Step 1: Do First. First, focus on essential tasks on the same day.
• Step 2: Schedule. If it's essential, but not-so-urgent stuff should be scheduled.
• Step 3: Delegate. If it's urgent but less critical, delegate to others.
• Step 4: Don’t Do. Don't do it at all if it's neither urgent nor essential.

Although the Eisenhower Matrix is not strictly an email management practice process, it can also be applied to email management to help you prioritize what you need to attend to and what you need to let go or delegate. This could help you save valuable time and boost your productivity.

4. Organize your inbox using folders, labels, and categories

Organizing your email inbox into folders and labels is one of the most critical email management techniques you need to master to keep your inbox clutter-free.

Your email service provider has already completed the first part of this step. Gmail is one of the world's biggest email service providers, and it has a default provision for organizations that sort. It is into the primary tab or main inbox, the promotion tab for marketing emails, and the social tab for all email notifications from social media tabs.

The same goes for all the other service providers, but to improve your email management practices, you need to create even more folders (or labels, as they are known in Gmail). You can prioritize emails according to the sender, purpose, or any other metric you choose.

💡Pro tip: To learn more about email folder management best practices, check out our guides on how to create folders in Gmail, how to create folders in Yahoo Mail, and how to create folders in Outlook.

5: Automate the organizational process

It is one thing to categorize your emails according to a specific metric after they land in your inbox. You'll need at least 15 minutes daily to do this.

However, you can reduce this time and automate the process to filter where your emails land before they're sent. You can do this using rule-based filters that separate emails using specific criteria, such as the sender's email address, specific keywords, or subject lines.

Here's a quick guide to help you do this in Gmail:

• Step 1. Type the filter keywords in the search bar.
• Step 2. Click on the filter icon.
• Step 3. Click on "Create filter.”
• Step 4. Choose an existing label or create a new one.
• Step 5. Click on "New label" to create a new one.
• Step 6. Type in the name and click "Create.”

6. Delete and Unsubscribe

One of the best things you can do for your inbox is delete useless emails. Many people struggle with this part of email management. Some are emotionally attached to specific emails, while others think they might need some of these emails again in the future.

Both sentiments are valid, but they're not always true. Additionally, the cost of leaving these emails in your inbox is often higher than deleting them, reducing productivity.

If the emails are promotional or marketing, deleting them is not the only thing you should do to keep your inbox clean. Unsubscribe from these newsletters, too, so you don't keep getting emails, most of which you rarely read.

💡Pro tip: Check out this guide to unsubscribing like a PRO.

Sometimes, unsubscribing might not be enough to stop getting these newsletters. You may need to remove your information from their website, so you must send a data deletion request.

Manually, this process takes time, perhaps more time than you can realistically spare. AgainstData created a super cool tool to simplify unsubscribing from emails.

7. Adopt the 2-minute rule

Email management techniques and time management often go hand in hand. This is logical because when you manage your inbox correctly, you save time on how long you spend sifting through tons of emails trying to find the right one.

The 2-minute rule, in this context, provides the perfect balance between managing your emails to stay clutter-free and using time wisely. It is based on the principle that you must complete a task immediately if it takes less than two minutes. So, if an email will take less than two minutes to read and reply to, you should probably save it for later.

This is not a hard and fast rule, as sometimes you may need to respond to a mail for over 2 minutes. However, using this principle where possible will help you manage your inbox and boost productivity.

8. Master inbox zero

Inbox zero is the ultimate email mentality any professional must adopt. Getting to inbox zero and maintaining it will provide the right environment for the above-listed email management strategies to thrive. Check out our guide to mastering inbox zero.

Take control of your inbox today

Mastering email management isn’t just about achieving inbox zero. It's all about developing a system that supports productivity and minimizes distractions. When you implement these strategies, you’ll have succeeded in creating a streamlined communication process that adds to your productivity and reduces email-related stress.

Start by applying one or two strategies and gradually build a routine that works for you. With the right approach, your inbox can become a tool for productivity rather than a source of overwhelm.