Don’t Let Your Inbox Get in the Way of Your Productivity! Organize Your Email!

Is Your Inbox on Fire?

I admit that I no longer find emailing to be a pleasurable activity. It is right up there with getting a cleaning at the dentist for me! Over the years I’ve probably received close to 100,000 emails since starting BiggerPockets Real Estate Investing Community. It is absolutely mindblowing to think that I get that much email, and at times it can be completely overwhealming (that number is only email for BiggerPockets, not for other sites I run or my personal email).

I have developed somewhat of a system to deal with all those message, and I’ll share it because I think others may find it to be helpful.

How to Organize Your Overflowing Inbox

• Immediately delete any and all SPAM messages. (pretty obvious, but worth a mention)
• Prioritize messages on a scale of importance.
  Most important messages (customer service emails, potential and current advertisers, partners, “important” people) need to be attended to immediately. I use Entourage (Mac version of Outlook) and flag every high priority post. This guarantees that I will not forget about the important ones. If I get lost in other, even more important, email messages or some other work, when reviewing the days messages periodically, I go immediately back to the flagged ones.

• Create folders for different categories of email.
  My Outlook/Entourage has a dozen folders and many more sub-folders. For example, I have a folder called “Advertising.” Within that folder, I have created sub-folders for each major advertiser I work with. Be sure that your folders are descriptive enough and specific enough that you’ll quickly and easily be able to locate messages down the line.

• Once you respond to a message, file it.
  After responding to the highest priority messages, move them into an appropriate folder.

• Return to the lower priority messages, and answer as many as you can.
  Once you’ve answered the high priority messages, you’ll be left with others that aren’t as important. If you get as much email as I do, you simply won’t be able to get to them all. Respond to any and all messages that will have a reflection on your business. Be sure to knock those out of the way, as your image can be tarnished if you aren’t responsive in many situations.

• Deal with the remaining messages at your will.
  I currently have 7763 messages in my inbox. While most of them are leftovers, at some point I must get to them. Take an hour or so each week to go through the leftovers. This may or may not get you through them all, but it will at least help you dig through the rubble. When looking at the remaining messages from the past days / weeks /months, re-prioritize again. Take care of the most important ones first; I often find that I can actually just remove many of the other messages to my trash.

If that all fails, you can always do like the mob does and “burn it down” (erase everything so you’re not stuck looking at the 7763 messages you still have to answer)! Do some spring cleaning and just get rid of the old messages sitting around. If the messages were important enough, you would have answered them right away anyway, so you do what you have to . . .

The simple fact is that sometimes, you can’t get to everyone. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day. If I were to respond to every message, I would never get anything accomplished . . . sometimes that happens anyway, but you can’t let your inbox get in the way of your productivity!

BTW – Here are 2 posts worth a look regarding productivity:
- Ten Productivity Tips – geared to web designers, but applicable to everyone
- A 2006 productivity hot-or-not guide – one bloggers look back at the tools that helped and didn’t help his productivity during 2006