Updated Minimalist Email Organization

I talked in my previous post about using a service called unroll.me to unsubscribe from and consolidate emails from various services. I’ve now stopped using it because I only get emails from a few retailers and find if I do want to make a purchase it’s better for the information to come my way immediately than to wait for it in the daily rollup. 

 

When I’m on my phone I view all inboxes together in the Gmail app. I don’t do much emailing from my phone – it’s used more to alert me if anything urgent comes up. On my computer I have a different profile picture for each email address and I use different theme colors so I simply know which inbox I’m operating in at a given time. 

 

I’ve also changed my work email to “compact” view so I can maximize the number of emails I can view at a time. Click on the gear icon and then display density to change it. 

 

This is the biggest change I’ve made to my email workflow, by far. I used to be the queen of folders and would file everything. And then I figured out how much time I was wasting and how there was a better way (in my defense, this better way is much easier in Gmail than with the service I was using with IBM). 

 

Instead of filing emails, I make a few key choices now:

• If I can respond to something immediately, I take care of it and do it right then. And instead of filing the email, I archive it. This allows me to search for the email if I need to later (and who has a better search function than Google?) and clears out my inbox effectively. 
• If it’s a task that can’t be taken care of immediately, I choose one of four labels.

Let’s talk about labels, because this has made my life 100x easier. Labels are a way to see what actually needs to be taken care of in your inbox. The four labels I use are: Action Required, Monitor, Response Needed, and Save for Later. 

 

Action Required means there’s something I need to do outside of just responding to the email. Monitor means there’s no other action for me to take right now, but that I should follow up (also, starting to experiment with “snoozing” emails and setting reminders for these scenarios, but I don’t have enough experience with that yet to comment). Response Needed means I need to reply to the email. Save for Later means I don’t need to reply, but may want to reference the email at a future time. 

 

Emails can have multiple labels depending on their nature and I find it helpful to color coordinate so I can take a quick glance and see how much I’m dealing with. I also put an * in front of each label so they show up first on my list when adding to an incoming message. 

 

I got a lot of my inspiration from this video. Though it’s more of a personal take, you can gather tips and it gives a pretty good illustration of how to do it yourself.