Fix Your Inbox (no AI needed)
10-15 minutes can restore sanity to your inbox - no AI, no purchases
If you’re anything like me:
you have at least 4 email accounts you check daily
all of these inboxes are a hellscape, but you still have to use them
some of it is self-inflicted - you keep signing up for newsletters and creating SaaS accounts
some of it is just the effect of the never-ending sales grifts that represent the weeds of your Internet lawn
Every now and then, I take some time to analyze my inbox and clean it up. My goal is to ensure that human correspondence and other important emails don’t get buried or missed. This is typically the stuff that you actually want/need to see and respond to.
All right, how do we get all this cleaned up with minimal effort? The goal here is to prevent the correspondence and other important emails from getting buried, without also loosing other important emails you might need from time-to-time.
Disable email notifications from all the apps that are also sending you notifications on your phone and show notifications/catch you up when you’re in the app itself. You don’t need 3-4 layers of notifications. Go into LinkedIn, click notifications, done. You don’t also need an email for all of it.
Create a message rule in your inbox that moves all email with an unsubscribe link in the body into a folder named “Automated Emails”. Sometimes you’ll need emails in this folder, but they almost never require your immediate attention. If you reset a password, you know you’re getting an email. You can search for it. It doesn’t need to be at the top of your main inbox folder for you to be able to find it quickly.
Look for common phrases from sales tactics and also move these emails into the “Automated Emails” folder. A common one I’ve been noticing lately is “not sure if you’re the right person”.
If you find that there are daily emails cluttering your inbox and you archive or delete them without reading them, 100% of the time, just take a few extra seconds and unsubscribe, or create a message rule to move them to another folder when they come in. Taking 5 minutes to do this can go SO FAR to clean up your inbox.
Send newsletters to a newsletter folder. A basic message rule to send anything from Substack and Medium to the newsletter folder can really clean things up. I use Hey Mail, and it has a default folder for newsletters and receipts. When someone sends you an email for the first time, you decide where it goes. This “routing when first received” approach works okay, though I often still skip it and have to go back and clean up stuff later.
Most inboxes have an icon that separates meeting invites from normal emails. When I check my email, I process these first, before doing anything else, because I need to make sure I don’t have any conflicts, and a lot of my income is attached to activities that come with meeting invites (podcast recordings, webcast recordings, etc). Your meeting invites might not be as valuable to you, so perhaps you should treat yours differently.
That’s really it - these 6 steps should take you just 10-15 minutes to implement and should go a long way to bring sanity back to your inbox. I could have written 10 steps, but I think this is enough to get you started and give you ideas on how you could take things further.
Or don’t take things further - the goal isn’t perfect inbox management, it’s just to make sure you don’t miss those super important emails that are timely and require your attention. I hope this helped you.