How to declutter your inbox
Lisa Du is director of ReadyTechGo, a service that helps people gain the confidence and skills to embrace modern technology.
Is your inbox looking a little cluttered? Are you finding it hard to find past emails amongst the sheer mess that it already houses? There’s a solution, of course!
Delete, delete, delete
The first thing you should do? Delete stuff. Delete as much as you possibly can. And be ruthless about it. Don’t delete anything that you might need, obviously, like important receipts, password information, or reminders. But something like a notification from Facebook telling you that it’s someone’s birthday...yeah, that can go.
For someone who doesn’t delete their emails, this will clear up your inbox considerably. In fact, it might take you a long while if you’re the type to leave hundreds of emails unread in your inbox. And for those of you who have thousands of unread emails, well... this process will be a lot more impractical for you.
File away your emails
Following this act of ruthless deletion, if your inbox is still looking a little too messy for your liking, there’s something else you can do: categorise. What this essentially means is that you can create different folders or labels for your emails, and then file your emails under each of these different folders accordingly. For instance, if you’ve been doing a little online shopping, and getting lots of confirmation emails for your orders, you might want to keep them in a folder called, “Shopping Receipts”.
Though there are a lot of email hosts out there, the steps are generally the same. Here’s how to do it on a couple of sites.
On Gmail.com:
- Go to Gmail on your browser and login to your account
- You’ll see a sidebar on the left-hand side of your screen with different email categories, including “Inbox” and “Sent Mail”. Click on “More”
- This will expand the sidebar selection. You’ll see a section that says “Categories”. Click on “Create new label” under this section
- In the dialog box that pops up, type in the name of your label
- Now, you’ll see your new label under the left-hand sidebar
- Simply click and drag your emails into this label to file them
- From now on, when you want to find emails under this label, you’ll need to click into the label to see them
On Outlook.com
- Login to your email account on Outlook.com
- You’ll see a sidebar on the left-hand side of your screen titled "Folders" with different email categories, including “Inbox” and “Junk Email”. Hover your mouse over this title
- Beside the word “Folders”, you’ll see a plus sign. Click on this plus sign to create a new folder
- At the bottom of your sidebar, you’ll see a new entry for a new folder. Type the name of your new folder into this entry and press ENTER on your keyboard
- This entry will now be a new folder under the left-hand sidebar
- Simply click and drag your emails into this folder to file them
- From now on, when you want to find emails under this folder, you’ll need to click into the folder to see them.
Being able to file your emails under different categories will not only clear up your inbox, but it will also introduce some order to your emails. Finding certain emails will be easier, your inbox will be less of an eyesore, and important emails will be less likely to become lost amongst a sea of spam.
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Image: Getty