Tips For: Staying On Top of Your Emails

A pretty common resolution for the new year is to stay more organized! I love, love, love organization and try to keep things as organized as possible. Your email inbox is probably one of the most "cluttered" areas of your life so I decided that I would share my tips for keeping your inbox contained and organized today!

As a high school student, email is one of the most common forms of communication I use. I use it for practically every aspect of my life and as a result, I have acquired quite a few email addresses to keep track of. The thing about emailing is if you don't constantly stay on top of it, you'll have 1,000 emails in your inbox before you know it! Since nobody wants (or needs) that, here are my tips for keeping your inbox under control!

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Create Folders

This definitely differs for each of my email accounts but folders are your best friend! For my school email, I have a folder for each year of high school, which is then divided up by my classes. For my personal, it's divided up by what I get emails from (for example: school, shopping, family). For blogging, I divide it up by general blog info, collabs with brands and other companies, and then for each of the blogging networks I'm involved in. You definitely should tailor your folders to aspects of your life so they work best for you!

Move Emails into the Folder they fit in

As soon as I get an email (and if I don't need it at the moment, which I'll talk about below), I'll move it into the folder it belongs to so that way I keep my number of emails at 0 or as close to 0 as possible! 

Delete Everything That Doesn't Apply to You

That email you got from the brand you don't particularly like? Delete! Spam mail? Delete! Only move things that will be useful again to you again into your folders (discount codes from J. Crew, any emails from school, meeting information, etc) and delete the rest!

Create Groups

If you are in charge of sending emails to a large group of people, do yourself a favor and add all of the recipients into a group! This way you only have to type in the name of your group rather than the emails of fifty people!

Only Keep the Important Items in your main Inbox

Since I move everything into folders as soon as I receive it (ex. that Lilly email into my shopping folder), I only keep the very important emails in my main inbox. Typically, for me, this means something I need to reply to, Google docs for a group assignment, something I need to add to my calendar, or something I need as a reminder (ex. meeting during lunch on Tuesday)

Reply ASAP

Working off the tip above, but be sure to respond as fast as possible if the email requires a reply! I will leave that email in my main inbox so I see it and respond in a timely fashion. It is so much more polite to respond quickly, especially involving a time-sensitive issue (ex. an email asking "What do we need to bring on Friday" should be responded to before Friday).

How do you keep your email organized? Let me know in the comments!