I will soon start a new job where I expect to receive significantly more emails than I do currently. So far, I haven’t had a system in place, except for marking emails as unread until I respond and occasionally using flags.
I would like to change that practice, now that I have a clean slate. But how do I start managing my inbox?
I use Mac Mail and would like to continue using it. I know how to set up rules and create smart mailboxes etc., but I can’t really see the potential.
Thank you!
For me I set up my corporate inbox with tons of rules to automate sorting inbound emails to relevant folders. I worked in software support so I had folders for each company my team communicated with on a regular basis, folders for internal emails like announcements and business/facilities updates, and the general inbox just caught anything I hadn’t created a rule for yet. Outlook folders all display unread counts to it was easy for me.
I didn’t delete anything. I let my companies retention policy handle that.
Did you then reply from the folders, or what was the point of this sorting? Genuine question.
And can you give rule examples? Was it just @ending go to folder A? ☺️
Yeah basically the rules where “if from domain A go to folder A.”
The organized folders basically served as a way to filter through stuff that I didn’t need to respond to, break things down into tasks I actually needed to respond to, and to make it easier to search through later.
So if I got an email from user@xdomain, it would go to my xdomain folder and be listed as unread and I would respond from there. Then that email chain stayed in its appropriate folder.
Easy: leave all emails that might be important as unread. That way, you know they’re important because they’re unread. Continue to never read them until you’ve got over 400 unread emails in your inbox. Then just mass delete any more than a month old, because they can’t still be important or relevant. Continue to feel guilty and not read emails.
Absolutely flawless system for me so far.
Recently I set a conditional formatting rule so that the email is highlighted yellow if I’m the only recipient in the To field.
This has really boosted my productivity because I can quickly spot the emails that need my immediate attention.
I’ve done something similar, if it’s just to me then I have a rule to flag it with tomorrow’s due date and I go through them the next morning. If it’s only to me, that’s one of the most obvious cases where I need to respond. I’m also working on resisting the impulse to check everything as soon as it comes in, and I turned off my email notifications so that’s a big help too.
I get a lot of email at my job (~200 per day) and to stay on top of the binge I need to separate emails that truly need action from those that I just need to read or can ignore entirely. The filing filing approach doesn’t work for me (even with automated rules) because it’s too easy to miss something when there are many places to check.
Here is what works for me. I use Outlook but other clients may have similar features:
- My inbox is my “to do list” as another commenter said, and all emails come into it. I’ve also disabled the Focused Inbox.
- I use conditional formatting rules to change the appearance of subject lines in the inbox depending on how they are addressed:
- If I am in the To line with other people then the format is standard Outlook formatting with blue text. Unread emails are bolded.
- If I am only in the CC line, the email is colored gray. Unread is still in bolded.
- If I am in the To line alone, then I keep the font color blue but increase the font size so it is BIG and obvious that an email is addressed to me specifically.
- Whenever I am “done” with an email (replied / read / taken action) then I move it out of my inbox into a single folder called Archive. I have a Quick Action set up to mark an email as read and move it to that folder.
- The “group by conversation” feature is a great help: it organized email chains by subject line, making it easy to find related emails. When a new email comes in the entire group pops to the top of my inbox (even emails that were archived), which helps if I’ve missed or forgotten something.
- To find things later, I make extensive use of the search functionality. Many email clients support complex searches to find exactly what you want. For example: “myproject from:Stacy to:Adam hasattachment:true”
I start most days by going through the gray/low priority emails and quickly clicking Archive on the ones that done need attention, then replying to those addressed to me. Throughout the day I only have ~10 emails that stay in the inbox as true “to do”, and below those are any I didn’t finish from the day before.
Good luck on your own email organization journey!
I’ve done this for years, but also:
- anything automated goes straight to specific folders for those categories. Very quickly identify stuff that’s noise and put in rules to move it out of your inbox. Sure some stuff you might need, but anything that’s corporate spam needs automating away.
- use (and create if necessary) the right mail groups so your whole team, project partners, whoever see the right emails and ask people to use them.
- add a VIP rule to highlight emails from the boss, VP, anyone you know you want to read right away
- be clear with people on how to reach you. If you prefer Slack for immediate stuff, tell people. It’s fine to be clear that email is for less immediate consumption, or non-conversational stuff. Slack is far better for collab.
At it’s core, whatever system you implement is going to have four buckets:
- I need to see and deal with this immediately
- I need to see this immediately, but can deal with it later
- I need to see this at some point
- This is a complete waste of my time
When you set up filters/rules, it’s typically safer to err in putting something in a higher priority bucket.
Past that, it really depends on the email you receive. For mine, an easy differentiator is if I’m a direct recipient, just a CC, or if I’m getting it as a member of a group mailbox. I get a lot of automated notifications, and those are easy to sort based on source and subject line.
