Fun Business Fun Money Podcast
EP 004 – Clean up your emails in less than 5 minutes
Are you one of the countless people with thousands of unread emails? This one is for you!
For some its a badge of honour and they just don’t care, but for most of us the thought of dealing with tens of thousands of emails is completely overwhelming.
In this quick tactic episode I share my simple system to boost your productivity and manage your emails like a boss on a daily basis.
TRANSCRIPT
Hey there, welcome back to the Fun Business Fun Money podcast!
Today I’ve got a tactic for you that has helped me and so many others that I’ve shared it with to create a new, simple daily habit. Its a quick fix for one of the biggest productivity blocks that, I’m going to say, most of the people with an email address – or two! – have experienced.
But this is particularly relevant for you if you’re a business owner who doesn’t have time for ‘boring admin stuff’.
That thing is… managing your emails. I’ve got a simple 5 step system that I’ll share with you shortly that will take you less than 5 minutes a day. Which frees you up for all the exciting, interesting, money making, creative things that you REALLY want to be focusing on instead, but also gives you peace of mind that you’re managing your emails ‘like a boss’.
If you’re on social media, whether its Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, all the places, you’ll probably notice from time to time people sharing how many unread emails they have sitting in their inbox.
Its like a badge of honour for some, I can think of a couple of personality types that would absolutely hate dealing with that stuff and rebel against cleaning it up – even if it made their day, their business, their results, a lot easier.
I spent 25 years working in various corporate admin roles. Most of my earliest jobs involved a lot of paper and a shared computer terminal that was used for basic functions. Yes, it was the digital dark ages! Which is kind of funny to think that its not really that long ago, we’re talking the mid 90s.
Then the internet and email became a more common thing in every office and home, and we started shifting everything into the digital world. Which I LOVED! It honestly made my work so much easier, I didn’t have to retain so much knowledge in my head because I could simply search for it.
I mentioned in one of my earlier episodes, where I shared some of my background and corporate career, that I have a simple process for managing emails.
This developed from having to manage OTHER people’s emails as part of my job. I had full visibility on their inbox and could send on their behalf, so theres a huge amount of trust involved at that level.
I would oversee what was coming in and prioritise them, removing spam or pointless stuff so my boss was maximising their time and attention on the things that actually mattered.
Everyone has different ways of managing their emails, it would always take a bit of time to adapt to how a new person wanted things done. Sometimes it was easy, especially if they were happy to take half an hour or so and show me what they wanted.
Others would look at me like I had two heads when I suggested they go over the basics with me, they couldn’t imagine anyone NOT doing it their way. I think it depends on what you’ve been taught to do – most people have adopted a system created by someone else without thinking about whether it really suits YOU.
With emails, the standard seems to be that anything you want to keep you create a sub folder for it and ‘file’ it, much like you would with a piece of paper in a filing cabinet. Anything else, in theory, is deleted.
The reality is that a lot of people simply don’t have the time or energy to implement or maintain that kind of system, you really do need an assistant to help you run it effectively.
Having to look at each email, decide its relevancy and then drag it to a particular folder, its a lot. Even more so when its a sub sub folder, like a tab in a folder to separate documents.
If this is how you do things, kudos to you! But I always wonder how you go about FINDING a filed email once you’ve put it somewhere. Because I’ve spent far too much time waiting while someone frantically clicks in and out of folders, muttering to themselves about keywords, who was it from, what was it about… yeah, you know what I’m talking about! LOL
Fast forward to now and most people are still trying to follow that same system that clearly doesn’t work for most of us! Especially if you’re in business for yourself, theres honestly no need to use a process that only applies to big corporate requirements.
So… What’s the alternative? SIMPLIFY THE PROCESS.
This works for every email provider I’ve ever used, they’re all much the same.
Its a 5 step process.
STEP 1 – Select all > Mark as read
BOOM! Depending on how many THOUSANDS of unread emails you have it could take a few seconds or a few minutes, but the end result is that you no longer have the red notification distracting you on your phone and triggering those thoughts of “Ugh, I hate that, I need to sort it out, I don’t have time, I wish it would just go away!” Ta da, its gone in a flash!
Now this doesn’t delete anything at all, thats not the point of it. And if you’re using an email provider that has a limit on your storage capacity you’re probably going to want to delete some junk and free up some space. We’ll get to that in a moment.
STEP 2 – Unsubscribe
Just because you’ve cleared the illusion of thousands of unread emails doesn’t mean they’re going to stop coming in. You’ve subscribed to lists, signed up for freebies or discount codes etc. Over time that junk piles up and you’re right back where you started.
Step 2 is to unsubscribe from emails AS THEY COME IN. You don’t need to scroll back through endless pages of stuff, just handle them as they land in your inbox. Unsubscribe, mark as junk, delete.
Its a task that should take no more than 2 minutes a day, just get it done so that over time you see less and less garbage and more of the things you actually enjoy in your inbox.
STEP 3 – Declutter
As I mentioned before, your email provider may have limits on your storage capacity, an example being Gmail gives you a standard 15GB across your email, photos, Drive, etc. You can pay for more storage but you might also find some wiggle room by deleting some stuff.
As you go through and unsubscribe from the newly landed ‘junk’, take a moment to sort your emails by that sender. It’ll group everything together so you can do a mass deletion of them.
STEP 4 – Make it a daily habit
Its all well and good to go through this and clean things up, but you’ve also got to maintain it. This is one of the best daily habits you can establish as a business owner, it honestly takes less than 5 minutes per day. Get in there and check your emails on the regular, delete and unsubscribe from what you don’t need, and keep the rest.
STEP 5 – use the search function
Now I’m sure you’re thinking “But how do I find an old email if I’m not filing them into folders?” Easy peasy – you use the SEARCH FUNCTION. Typing in a keyword or a persons name is SO MUCH QUICKER than scrolling through trying to find something, or clicking in and out of folders.
If the idea of leaving everything in your inbox gives you hives, by all means drop them into folders so you can achieve ‘inbox zero’. Personally I like knowing anything I might need is easily accessible with a quick search and I don’t have to remember information based on categories or projects.
This is just one simple, easy way to clean up your inbox and move forward with one less thing to distract you from achieving your goals.
Simple systems like this are an absolute game changer for any business – its all about making your life easier, knowing that you’re not missing anything important amongst the digital junk.
Let me know if this is something you’re going to try, or have tried now you’ve heard this. Or maybe you have an even BETTER way of managing your emails, in which case I need to hear about THAT! I love hearing that people are implementing simpler and easier ways to do essential tasks.
You can tag me on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, I’m @fun business fun Money or you can search for Deirdre Amies, I’m the only one out there! You can also drop me an email at hello@deirdreamies.com – you’ll find the link for that with my not so easy to spell name in the description.
And obviously I’ll see your email in a timely manner because I’ve got this simple easy system in place, nothing gets ‘lost’ in my inbox!
Thats it from me, take care, have fun decluttering your emails and I’ll catch you in another episode!
