Email Tip 1
Hello everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And for years, I spent much more than 30% of my day in my inbox,
but after applying these five techniques, I spend no more than one hour per day, and you can do the same thing. So let's dive in. Tip number one, turn off all of your email notifications, both your desktop and mobile notifications.
To this day, Microsoft Outlook by default will show the preview of each and every new email for the desktop version of Outlook. That means even if Outlook is minimized, you're going to see a preview in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Nothing is more distracting
or will tempt you to spend more time with email than by seeing all of those notifications. But don't forget to turn off your notifications on your mobile device as well. Whether you use Outlook, Gmail, or some other mail client, be sure to remove the notification badges on the front of your app. You know what I'm talking about,
that little red circle that shows you the number of unread emails. Not only will that distract you and tempt you to open up your mail app more often than you need to,
but it also adds an awful lot of stress as you see that number grow and grow. Don't worry about the number. You should always expect to be receiving new emails
throughout your day, even while you sleep. So instead of letting technology dictate
when you choose to deal with email, decide to choose for yourself how often you want to open up the email app.
Email Tip 2
Tip number two, move all of your read or replied emails out of your inbox. Something that wastes so much of our time is trying to decide, where should I start and where should I stop when it comes to addressing my inbox? And here you can see I've got a number of emails which I've either read or replied to.
Well, the easiest and best way to keep a clean inbox is to remove everything once you have touched it, once you've read it, once you've replied to it, once you no longer need it, be sure to move it to your archive folder or to some other folder or label.
Or if you're really not going to need it again, you can simply go ahead and delete it. Every single email client has a safeguard in place, where anything that is moved to the trash folder, for example, will actually remain there for 30 days.
So if you need to go back and retrieve it, you can still find it. And archiving your emails is maybe one of the simplest ways to keeping a clean inbox. Let me show you how easy you can do that here within Gmail without taking an extra step.
Within our settings menu, we can come down to this one called Send and Archive. And if you select the top radio button, it will say, show "Send & Archive" button in reply.
What that means is if I come up here to this email and I decide to reply to it, instead of just hitting Send and have this message remain in my inbox, I can select Send and Archive. The message is sent, and now I'm moved on to my very next email.
Coming back to my inbox, that message is no longer here. I'm one step closer to keeping a cleaner inbox. Now, if you're overwhelmed with where to start with cleaning out a very messy and overwhelmed inbox, I've got a tool for you.
SaneBox has recently released a new tool called Email Deep Clean, so you can regain all of that storage and clean out your inbox. In just a matter of seconds, you can determine how far back you would like it to scan and then select which sender,
either based on the total number of emails or the total number of space taken that you would like to remove. This is probably the fastest and easiest way to clean out any inbox, whether you use Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, or any other email client.
And best of all, you don't have to use some complicated search or filters to do so.
If you want to learn more and use Deep Email Clean for free, be sure to click the link in the description down below.
Email Tip 3
Tip number three, get comfortable with using search instead of creating dozens and dozens of folders. So often I see people wasting time by dragging every single email into a dedicated folder and deciding which label that they should apply to almost every single email.
Instead of creating these folders to click onto on the left-hand side of your screen, be sure to make use of the search function.
So for example, rather than just producing a client folder, I can just search for my client's name in the search field, and suddenly, every single message will come up in front of me. Further yet, if I want to go into more detail, you can always use the advanced search option.
So for example, maybe I want to make sure that I'm looking for an email that only has a specific attachment. Well, I can easily do that here as well and go directly to what I'm looking for.
In addition to the search bar itself, Gmail and Outlook have added some quick buttons that will get us there that much faster.
Here, for example, in Gmail, I can quickly see if I want to filter by a specific timeframe, if I want to filter by an attachment, or if I want to look for a recent sender or search for a certain email address.
So this makes it that much easier for me to find what I'm looking for rather than wasting all of my time sorting through and filing every single one of my emails.
Email Tip 4
Number four, unsubscribe or block senders you don't want to see ever again. I know that it may seem like it's going to be a bit time consuming upfront to unsubscribe to a particular sender, but think about how often you click on their messages and just get into the habit of deleting those particular messages.
Instead, why don't you just take a few seconds upfront and actually unsubscribe to those newsletters or other marketing emails. Almost any marketing email, if you scroll to the bottom, will have some type of link such as this one, where you can unsubscribe from the list.
But what if that particular email sender does not honor your subscribe request or you can't find the unsubscribed link? Well, in this case, you can choose to block that sender
so you won't receive emails from them in your inbox. Here within Gmail, if I come up here and select more, I can select Block, and then in brackets, it will give me the username of the particular sender.
In this case, going forward, I won't receive messages from them, a quick and easy way, especially if I can't find the unsubscribe link.
Email Tip 5
Now, my fifth and final tip in saving time with email may be the most difficult,
but also the most valuable, and that is to only deal with email a maximum of three times per day. Years ago, I used to spend most of my day with my inbox open on one of my multiple screens. This led me to dealing with email nonstop throughout my day
and not accomplishing the things that I wanted to. But when I chose to drastically pull back and only deal with email twice in my day, once in the morning, and once in the afternoon, not only was I able to accomplish so much more, but I was actually able to get through more of my email.
Why? By only choosing to deal with email at specific times, I could batch and get through so many more of those messages
and then not feel the need to come back to my inbox so frequently. This may be difficult to implement at first, but trust me, it is so worth it. Of all of the the tips on today's list, this may make the biggest difference.
By combining the other four with this one, you are going to not only set yourself up for success, but spend a lot less time with email, saving you so much more time for your business, your clients, or whatever other projects you are working on.
And if you're wanting to be even more efficient and effective with your email, be sure to watch this video next, where I show you how to be a master of your filters right here within Gmail.
