Friday, September 3, 2010

Tips and techniques for a clutter free inbox

Overloading your inbox could hamper your peace of mind. There are effective tips and techniques to ensure that your inbox is maintained to level zero all round the year. Following a systematic approach can ensure that your inbox is clutter free. Inbox is not meant to store all emails. The aim is to take action on the emails according to their priority. Yet there are some emails that needs to be stored and these can be filed for future use. Creating folders is a certain way to contain your inbox but this cannot be considered a standard practice. Though this can keep your inbox zero they push all these into folders that has to be looked into at a later stage. This can only increase the number of folders and create more work for you. A piece of advice is that check emails regularly, prioritize them and clear them immediately. This is the best way to accomplish size zero in your inbox.

There are certain emails that may need just less than a minute to reply. Do so and delete the message from your inbox. Mails that need more time to be resolved can be acted on through the day and cleared. All this depends on how much you can process in a day. If you want to move towards your goal of inbox zero then it is time that you clear your backlog first. All unprocessed files have to be acted upon. Once this is done, see to that only important messages reach your inbox. This way you will not have any worries about missing important messages.

Mailing list, job listing, automated messages are items that can be avoided or trimmed to a minimum. See to that if you can convert your daily newsletters or notifications into weekly or bi weekly. This could reduce the clutter in your inbox and can give you space to move around freely.

If you are running a website and cannot avoid getting messages from customers, here is a recommendation. Force the visitors to use a web form as this can help to contain your messages to a large extent. This way you can stay focused.

Of course you will be receiving messages from friends. Try opting for social networking websites where you can keep in constant touch with your friends, instead of clogging your inbox with casual emails.

Emails that need no action can be pushed to spam. Just trash them and move on.

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